


all your failures will die starry-eyed

by omegalomania



Series: pray for disaster (when the world is razed we'll still be burning) [2]
Category: Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys - My Chemical Romance (Album), The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys (Comic)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, Drug Withdrawal, Emetophobia, Found Family, Gen, Gender Dysphoria, Genderfluid Character, Graphic Description of Corpses, Implied Surgical Horror, Implied/Referenced Drug Addiction, Implied/Referenced Government Experimentation, Maladaptive Coping, Minor Character Death, Nonbinary Character, Nonbinary Party Poison (Danger Days), Nonbinary Show Pony (Danger Days), Not RPF, Origin Story, POV Second Person, References to Addiction, Selectively Mute Character, Self-Harm, Synesthesia, Terminal Illnesses, The Fabulous Killjoys (Danger Days) Are Not MCR, Trans Character, Trans Jet Star (Danger Days), internalized ableism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-31
Updated: 2020-02-16
Packaged: 2021-01-15 22:49:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 131,683
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21260918
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/omegalomania/pseuds/omegalomania
Summary: "When you meet Jet Star, he's already lost two whole crews and has settled for running solo rather than risk losing a third. You learn that Jet Star can shoot a flattened can off the hood of a car at two hundred meters without so much as leaving a scorch mark. You learn that Jet Star can do long division in his head without thinking twice about it, and that he can tie a tourniquet in the middle of a clap without breaking a sweat. You learn that he knows how to prep a needle to draw blood in an emergency, how to flame-sterilize the nearest tool so it can cut away necrosing flesh, how to stitch a wound one-handed. You don't ask him how he knows any of it, and he never says."





	1. second sun to the right (and straight on 'till mourning)

**Author's Note:**

> This story fits into the broader narrative of this series, but the series does not need to be read in any particular order. The series does not necessarily progress chronologically, but contains multiple stories that nest into one another. Storylines interlock and branch away from each other; you will see the same stories told through different sets of eyes. Everything in this series shares the same universe. Some names, concepts, and characters are of my own design.
> 
> As indicated in the tags, there are a number of content warnings I wish to impart prior to the start of this work. To minimize extra work for AO3's devoted tag wranglers, I will elaborate on those content warnings here:
> 
> This fic contains canon-typical violence, including gun violence, dead bodies, and graphic descriptions of said bodies. Some of this violence involves characters who are very young. Some characters suffer graphic injuries to their faces and extremities. Some characters suffer from unnamed illnesses and terminal conditions whose symptoms include skin lesions, chronic pain, physical fatigue, and frequent vomiting. Multiple characters struggle with suicide ideation at certain points, but it is not named or addressed verbally. This fic as a whole deals extensively with themes of grief, loss, and PTSD.
> 
> Multiple characters also struggle with many of the themes present in canon material already - brainwashing, overmedication, addiction, withdrawal, etc. - and their handling of these topics is not always done sensitively or with kind language. Some characters refer to addicts with cruel and derogatory terms. Some characters discuss gender very briefly, but only in vague terms. Multiple characters are written actively struggling with their own neuroses and a great deal of disordered thinking, and have not been equipped with the tools to recognize or address these mental health issues; their own internalized ableism does warp their perceptions of themselves and of others. These opinions do not reflect the viewpoints of the author, but are the product of the canon environment.

**\--**

**look up  
see the stars  
up in the weathered skies**

**\--**

The first one to die is your mother.

You don't remember enough of your life before a certain point to know who she was, or what she wanted you to be. Doublestar tells you that you were born in the desert, and you don't remember enough to know whether or not that's true. You can catalogue the lists of sounds you remember hearing, for the first time in your life: the whine of desert insects, the distant roar of detonations, the purr of an idling motor.

You know that you had a mother because when you taste the sting of the rare chill of a coastal breeze and concentrate, you can just barely bring her features into focus: a pale blur of a smile surrounded by dark ringlets.

The first one to die is your mother. You never knew her well enough to mourn. You only know that she existed, and that she no longer does.

Instead, you have Doublestar. She's older than the rest of her crew - you can tell by the crow's feet spidering out from the corners of her eyes and the paler streaks in her hair - and she says that she grew up in Battery City, that wall of shimmering white on the horizon, at the very edge of Zone One. Her face always gets a sour look when she talks about the City, and the people who run it. _Better Living Industries._ BLi. She spits the words out harshly, like they're snake venom. Never go there, she says. Out here, people die quickly, and she calls that a mercy. Inside the City walls, she says, they die slow.

She's how you know your letters and numbers and how to count on your fingers and write in the sand and then how to do it faster, so fast that you can do it without needing to scratch anything into the ground. She makes sure you all know everything she knows: how to write your names, how to add up carbons and make sure that no one's trying to cheap you out of a deal, how to spell things the right way. She says that she had to learn this shit in Battery City, so she might as well make sure it gets put to good use. The fact that you learn those letters and numbers diligently makes you a rarity out in the Zones, where most people do their transactions verbally, and whose hands are so wracked with hunger shakes and heat shakes and withdrawal shakes that the ones that _are_ literate enough to write can only barely manage it. You learn how to recite her words over and over and over again, repeat them silently until they stick fast in the walls of your memory.

More than that, she teaches you how to last in the desert. She says she had to learn it all the hard way, which isn't the same as the Bat City way, so if she can do one thing right, it's ensure that no one else she meets has to figure it out the way she did. 

She teaches you never to go to Zone One. There's war there, she says, but the war's already crawling further and further up across the desert.

Her face comes to mind faster than the one that you think belonged to your mother, which never sharpens to anything beyond an indistinct fog. Doublestar is your constant, her words carved into the contours of your mind. Sometimes the smell of lizard droppings and the feel of a scab rubbing up against the cuff of your shirt stirs her lessons into sharper relief, and you can breathe with her words sitting against the edges of your mind, and her face filling the space behind the backs of your closed lids: her sun-freckled skin, narrow eyes, flat nose, and the obsidian-dark, scratchy-stiff mane of her hair. It feels like her hair only ever gets longer and wilder and more matted, even when she winds it into a messy braid or ties it back.

You've got hair like hers. It grows longer and it grows _out,_ too, though it's curlier than anyone else's. Doublestar never cuts her hair or does anything to make it behave and so neither do you. It tickles your cheeks and your chin and the back of your neck.

You don't get to know your mother but you do get to know Doublestar, and she says that she knew your mother enough to know it was her job to take care of you. The ochre trunk of her arm rattles with the circles of beads, wood-carved things that she kisses, sometimes, or whispers things to, too quiet for you to hear.

The day you ask her what they're for is the day that she takes your hand in hers and slowly slides one of her strands of beads over her thick wrist and her knuckles that have become so worn that the calluses have become scar tissue, and onto yours.

It's too big. It hangs from the skinny stem of your arm. Up close, you can see the little figures carved into them - letters made up of squares and lines that you know because Doublestar knows. _Black cat,_ says one, and _thirteen_ says another.

"They're my bad luck beads," says Doublestar. Her smile is strained, but you can feel her eyes on you as you roll the worn, carved beads between your fingertips, carefully inspecting each one. The words have a slight lisp from the dulled-down nubs of her teeth, which she once told you were the result of the pills and chemicals from the City and how they caused her to grind them into grit. "You keep all the bad luck on your wrist, it'll never find you. You always know exactly where it is."

She looks out into the horizon, at the spiky silhouettes of cacti against the fiery pink cast of the setting sun. The pollution-rich atmosphere always ignites the clouds like the ends of flare guns, brilliant and poison-bright.

"People used to say they came from the Witch."

You know the Witch. She's told you about Her, though you've never seen Her for yourself. She's a specter of death, and Doublestar and her crew belong to the mechanical sprawl of Destroya. You're satellite chasers, watching the shooting stars from the dark velvet of the night sky and tracking them until they hit the sand, lighting up the horizon with a blitz of white-hot incandescence. It's a hard job to get there before the exterminators do, but the parts and scrap that used to belong to the service droids built into the pieces can fetch a high price on the right market. That, and it keeps BLi from tracking anyone down using the signals that shoot out into the desert sky.

Doublestar always makes you leave something of your findings to Destroya - buried under the sand, and marked with its name so that the pieces can find their way back. It's a cruel and low sort of person, she says, that doesn't thank their patron for its sacrifice. The Witch guides the dead, but Destroya is a deity for the living.

So she doesn't talk about the Witch very often.

She taps the ridges of the beads hanging loose around your wrist.

"Those ones were your mom's."

She talks about your mother even less. 

You look up at her with a new tightness in your lungs that you can't identify.

Doublestar's smile becomes a right-angled thing, a more familiar beast, as she stands and puts a hand to your head as she leaves. The contact is a five-point star of warmth, and it's too brief before it's gone.

It's the only time she ever implies the extent to which she knew your mother.

**\--**

**see the centuries passing you by  
in the blink of an eye**

**\--**

"Do it again," says Doublestar. She's teaching the four of you to shoot. You're the youngest of her crew, easily, and you've taken to life in the Zones, easily - maybe because it's the only life you remember living. To your right is Nine-Volt Rocket, teenaged and gangling, dreads pulled into a messy bun on the top of their head. They pant slightly, wiping away a trickle of sweat running down their forehead and threatening to stream into their eyes. City kid, dragged from their Better Living by someone who didn't make the trip over the city line. They've never said who. They were just lucky that Doublestar has a soft spot for scared kids with nowhere to go, but she wasn't about to leave them in the battlefield that's become of Zone One.

There's war there. Has been for as long as you can remember. People camped out in trenches, bombarded by ordnances, trying to blast holes in the walls of Battery City. You hear the sounds of it sometimes, when you get close to the Zones around the City - the high shriek of laser fire and the _boom_ of an explosion that shakes the ground beneath your feet.

Right now, you take careful aim at the line of cans that Doublestar has instructed you to shoot. Your next shot streaks over the vibrant swirl of neon colors across the front of your allotted can - closer than before, but still not close enough.

Doublestar tells you that color was a rarity in Battery City. Growing up surrounded by the colors of the desert, it's hard to believe that there's a kind of person that would think the world should be stripped of all those hues and shades. Everything out in the desert makes a noise, and every noise has a color. The soft hums of invisible insects, the breeze over the grains of sand, the scuttle of reptilian feet over stone, they all light up your brain in a symphony of blues. The rumble of a motor spinning to life spits flares of golden orange against the brilliant midnight backdrop of the desert wind.

The desert is a canvas, and so is your head. No pill could ever shut that out.

"Aim steadier," Doublestar instructs you, crouching behind. Her fingers are slender and calloused with sunburn when they adjust your grip. "Two-handed is best, until you learn your balance."

There's another bolt of plasma from your right. It misses. Annoyed, Rocket hisses in through their front teeth which, thanks to the significant chip taken out of one of them, always generates a sucking, whistling sort of sound that's long since stopped bothering you, but still hasn't stopped bothering the twins to your left.

"Take aim," says Doublestar, steadily, "and try again. That goes double for you two."

She pins the twins with a steely look that cuts any potential argument short. Coma Doze, the shorter and thicker of the two, grumbles something indistinctly and squares his feet into the dust, spreading them a shoulder-width apart just like Doublestar directs. His hair is cropped short and bleached a stark bone-white to contrast the burnt russet of his skin. It's the same color as the pale speckling of scar tissue that decorates the ridges of his outer arms and one side of his face. Satellite chasing is a special sort of danger, even for a zonerunner. All five of you are already freckled with shrapnel scars.

Coma's sister is the first one to graze her designated can, and celebrates with a delighted, wordless yell as she bounces on her heels. Nova Cane's hair is a torrent of blue and teal, falling in uneven waves over the darker umber of her sunburned neck. Doublestar has scolded them for dressing in bright colors like killjoys, not that it's stopped them from dying their hair and painting their guns anyway.

"Again, Nova," says Doublestar. It's the set of her shoulders that gives away her pride, and the way she lets Nova take the shot without feeling the need to call out for any sort of adjustment.

She makes you practice whenever time and resources allow. You learn to shoot cans off of car-tops before you've had your first growth spurt.

Her rigorous teaching means that Rocket can shoot a white-masked terror in the knee when it ambushes three of you one day, and that buys Doublestar the time to grab the thing around the chin and _twist_ its head hard enough to rotate it completely on the stalk of its neck with a loud and horrible _crack._

Doublestar lets it drop, and before it's even hit the dust, she's looking at you. She's crouched in front of you, hands on your shoulders, and her voice is steady enough to slow the hammering of your heart by mere increments.

"Run," she says. "Run and find the twins and _get them back here."_

You take off at a dead sprint. You might be the youngest by far and you might have smaller legs, but you already know that you can outrun everyone else, even with the sun blistering in the sky. It darkens your skin by degrees and burns it during the worst and hottest days. You can still bear the overhead radioactive blaze better than anyone. From the day you were old enough to process what it meant to live in the desert, you learned to tolerate the pain and to bite your cheek instead of crying out. As soon as you were old enough to walk, old enough to think for yourself, you learned that the desert is immeasurably harsh, and that everything in it will hurt. The inescapable photon bombardment hurts, the sand scrapes burned skin raw, and the heat parches your throat. You've already gone nights without eating, and you know that sleep is a restive creature interrupted by the moments where you have to be shaken awake and move, _quick,_ for reasons that were never quite clear to you until now.

You think of the dead, bleached-white thing lying limp in the sand: the unnatural set of its features, the way they seemed too stiff and unmoving. The dark mat of its black, unruly hair that looks like it would feel like static if you touched it. You've seen its kind before. You can't live in the desert and _not_ have seen them. It's just that this is the first time you've ever seen one this close.

Then you think of the urgency in Doublestar's tone. She never says anything unless it's important, but that grave chord in the rasp of her tone was new. It's enough to prickle the hairs on the back of your neck.

You run faster.

It's easy to find the twins. They're busy dragging half of a car door, the casualty of an old auto wreck, into the back of what used to be what Doublestar calls a camper van. It's the third car you can remember having, and it's arguably the worst. It eats gas faster than anything, even if it's bigger and carries more. It's slow, and it makes a bigger target. Coma won't say where he found it. He also insists on driving it. Usually, unless Doublestar is there to commandeer the wheel, he gets his wish. No one else wants the frustration of trying to steer that shuddering wreck over dry sand.

You don't have the breath to explain what's happened. You don't have a message to pass along. You don't have someone else's words sitting in the back of your tongue. The look on your face is enough. Nova takes one glance at you and asks you where Doublestar is.

You point, and turn to run. Coma makes you sit with him in the front seat instead. He says that you'll get there faster that way, and like hell he's leaving the supplies unguarded.

Privately, you're not sure that the van is likely to reach Doublestar faster than your own two feet, but you don't have the moisture in your heat-blistered lungs to protest. It just so happens that by the time the camper van trundles onto the scene, Doublestar has a hole six feet deep and one foot planted up against the white mound of the body's back. With a powerful shove, she tips it inside.

Rocket stares at the shape in the ground. Their face is ashen. They don't look as though they've even let go of their raygun since it happened.

Nova looks away. Coma hunches his shoulders. Neither of seem the least bit surprised, but neither of them say a word.

Doublestar wipes her hands on her pants and stops in front of you and Rocket.

This is a draculoid, she tells you. A drac, she tells you. They're mindless drones. They don't think. They had masks yanked over their heads and their souls sucked clean out of their skulls, and now they just follow BLi without question, and you know what that means. Being sapped of a soul is one of the four levels of dead that there's no coming back from. So dracs will kill you or mask you or drag you back to the City to iron all the creases out of your head. The only thing you can do for them, she says, is kill them before they kill you. They're not supposed to be this far out, she says, because most of them are busy fighting in the Wars in Zone One. 

Now bury it, she tells you.

All four of you spend the rest of the hour heaping sand and dirt over the corpse in the grave until the white is stained brown, and then until it isn't visible at all.

That's the first time you see someone die, though you don't realize it at the time. Maybe it doesn't really count as seeing someone die. Do they really die, if they don't have a soul? Did they die when the mask went on in the first place? Has the Witch already taken them to rest?

It's those sightless eyes, the rubbery stillness of the mask, the crisp white lines of the draculoid's suit, that dog you for the days afterward. You spend the hours when you should be asleep nervously twisting your beads around your wrist and chewing on the knuckle of your thumb. You shut your eyes. The draculoid lingers behind your closed lids in a blot of brilliant, bone white. You know it bothers Rocket, too. They keep looking over their shoulder, and they've developed a nervous twitch of their hand to the raygun at their hip at the slightest sound.

Nova and Coma are older than both of you. They've seen dracs before. Coma says they're not so scary, because they die as easy as anything. Nova says they're dumb as rocks and just as easy to shoot.

You, though. You can't get the sight of the pale lump in the sand out of your head.

"You not sleeping, kiddo?" asks Doublestar, when you miss every shot during target practice only two days after. She waits for the other three to go stumping back to the camper van. Rocket has their chest puffed out in pride; for once, they didn't miss a single shot. Coma's daring them to try and hit something at double the length, while Nova gives them shit for it. The high chime of their banter fades into the smoky blue dusk, until it's just you and Doublestar.

You rub at the bruise-purple smears beneath your eyes with the back of one wrist, and stare at the ground.

Doublestar doesn't sound mad. She kneels until she's level with you, and looks you eye to eye.

"It's the drac, isn't it." It's not really a question, not when she already knows the answer. You nod, and it's a good thing that she's able to say it for you, because there's a lump in your throat that's making it harder than usual to speak.

Doublestar sighs. She puts a hand onto your shoulder. Like all contact, it's fleeting. Her thumb rubs up against the fabric of your jacket, a ghost of pressure against the bony peak of the joint underneath.

"It's dead, baby," says Doublestar. The words are soft.

You nod.

"It's dead. It's not coming back."

You nod.

"They can send more if they want. We'll shoot 'em all down. That's why I'm teaching you to shoot, yeah? So the next time one of them thinks they can take us, you can shoot 'em all down." The cadence of her words is stabilizing, familiar. The rhythm and repetition. The words that have the faint dressing of some kind of accent that doesn't feel one hundred percent like it belongs out in the Zones. 

It'd be nice if you could think of something to say in reply. It's not like you don't know how to talk to her. You've talked to her lots, in your own way. She was the first one you talked to when you said you thought you might be a boy, and she'd looked you dead in the eye and said that if you thought you might be one then that meant that you were one, and that you shouldn't let anyone tell you different, and she was the one to tell everyone else to call you the right words and everything.

It's different, right now. It's harder.

When you still don't answer, she sighs, gives your shoulder one last squeeze, and stands.

"Let's get packed up," says Doublestar. "We gotta lotta ground to cover if we wanna reach Zone Five by tomorrow night."

You recognize a dismissal when you hear one. Again, you nod, and you follow her. She doesn't have the time to try and assuage whatever you might be feeling in the moment. She taught you all the words she knows, as if to make up for how little she seems to use them. That's why she puts guns in your hands, and shows you how to shoot. All the words in the world won't stop the laser blasts from burning into your heart, so she teaches you to shoot first. Burn them before they burn you.

She didn't need a gun to fell the thing that's now facedown, buried in the sand. A draculoid. A drac. You taste the word under your tongue. The roll of the "r." The hard stop of the "c." It sends shivers of blinding acid-yellow slinking along the back of your mind.

It's not that you don't know how to speak. It's not that you don't know how to talk to Doublestar. It's that you don't know how to articulate what it is about the encounter that sits uncomfortably in your soul: not that the draculoid had found you, that Rocket had shot it, that Doublestar had wrenched its head hard enough to break its neck and crack the bone, nor that that you helped bury it afterwards.

It was the stillness that struck you, more than anything else.

It was the emptiness in a corpse. It was the first time you had to watch that unmoving strangeness up close in your memory, and the lack of motion in a world _full_ of it had felt wrong. The violence wasn't in the act that snapped the bone and killed it, but rather the absence of movement that followed.

Has its soul already gone?

Had it been carried off and laid to rest the moment the mask was pulled over its head?

Is its soul gone forever now?

Is it with the Witch? Did She take it home safe?

That night, you rub your beads between your fingers - fingers already roughening with the calluses that come with lugging scrap metal into car trunks and shucking spent battery packs from rayguns and scrubbing sand from your hair and clothes. There's barely a seam where the symbols have been inlaid into the wooden beads. The work put into them must have been incredible, to make the set so seamless...or perhaps it was the persistent rubbing of fingers over the curves that wore them into such a smoothness.

You press one of the beads to your lips, the way you remember Doublestar does.

You ask the Witch to take the draculoid's soul somewhere safe. You know that you're supposed to use one of the mailboxes when you contact the Witch, but you haven't seen one for weeks, and there's no telling when you'll stop by one next. You're satellite chasers, Destroya's people, and you can speak to something that immense anytime you need to, with a piece of scrap planted in the sand, but Destroya doesn't guide the dead home. The Witch only has those little gaps, those doorways into the world She presides over, and you don't happen by them nearly often enough to leave Her a letter, even if you know how to write it.

A prayer over a string of beads will have to be enough for the first soul you see ever see taken in front of you.

**\--**

**see the deaths of galaxies  
millions of years ago**

**\--**

The camper van lasts another two weeks before the engine finally rumbles its last. You get the feeling that Coma would be beating the shit out of the thing right now, if you and him weren't crouched down behind its toppled silhouette as a tight knot of dracs leave scorch marks on the sun-fried aluminum.

"Gimme your gun," says Coma, hand held out. He's not looking at you. He's trying to get a good line of sight on the dracs as they keep firing, and promptly has to duck down when one of those streaks of plasma singes a spot not two inches from the dark glasses sliding down his nose. His own raygun was in the backseat when the van began to topple. The pair of you only barely managed to scramble out with your lives, and if you live through this, you think that Coma's never going to forget to carry his gun with him again. But you're the only one who has a gun now, and even if the battery has a full charge, it's not much against what you estimate to be five or six draculoids.

Coma's hand is still held out, palm up, expectant. You don't tell him that you think you're a better shot than he is. Your shooting's evened out since you started praying to the Witch. Maybe She guides your hand, so that the shots strike where they're meant to go. More likely, you've started sleeping better since you began praying to Her, and since then, you've practiced more than he has.

Now's your chance to prove it. You wet your lips, crouched in the sand beside him.

"I can do it."

Coma actually looks at you for that, but his brow is furrowed.

"What? No. No, you're our runner. You gimme your gun, and go find Doublestar. _¿Comprende?"_

You're also faster at running than he is. You're faster than anyone you know. More importantly, you're smaller, and therefore harder to hit.

You give him your gun.

You sprint out across the sands. The bolts of draculoid rayguns fry the sand at your feet and blaze harmlessly over your head, but you're moving farther away than they can track. Doublestar called them mindless and soulless, and you have to assume that's true; if they could think, they'd know to lead their shots. They'd know to aim for where you're going to be, instead of where you are.

You're a strong runner, and you're a smaller, darker target than Coma, with his multicolored coat and bleached hair. You make it to Doublestar and the others even with the sun creeping higher in the sky. It'd be around the time that you'd all be settling to sleep, somewhere out of the heat, if it weren't an emergency. 

The cost is how badly you're winded by the time you skid down the last bluff and nearly trip and stumble directly into Doublestar. She catches you by your shoulders and steadies you, and all you can do is point up, back at the way you came, with your heart still drum-beating against your ribs.

"C-Coma - "

She doesn't hesitate. She squeezes your shoulder once, then stands and cups a hand around her mouth.

"Hit the red line, you two! Coma's in a clap."

Nova's first to bound up and past her, her hair streaming out behind her. She's a blur of yellow-on-purple, wind-battered vest over ragged shirt. Rocket is at her heels almost at once, and then you're back to running, leading the way back to Coma's position. There's no room for anything in your head but the yellow-orange bursts of feet beating against the sand, and the lime-green sputters of three sets of lungs breathing hard to keep up.

Coma's managed to nail one of the dracs clean through the head when you finally reach him; one is splayed out in the dust with smoke boiling out of the hole in its temple. The rest are still firing at the only cover he has, while several others have started to creep around either side of the camper in an effort to flank him. The aluminum-silver of the van has been burned a mottled black from the sheer volume of ray-blasts striking its shell. The air stinks of sparking flesh and burning latex.

"Motherfucking _pendejo_, I'll kick your fucking ass for this!" snarls Nova, vaulting clean over the downed camper. She's not talking to the dracs she's scattering like a flock of vultures with wild gunfire. She's talking to her brother, punctuating each blast of her raygun with another spat-out curse.

"Watch your six, Nova," says Doublestar, a droll warning issued as though you're not all caught in the chaos of a firefight. "Rocket, stay frosty."

That means that it's Rocket's job to make sure you don't get killed. She wouldn't have to give the order if you had a gun, but Coma's busy using it to miss every dozenth shot he makes, when he's not cowering behind the camper van.

Doublestar has to stay at Nova's back. She has to, because Nova's not paying a lick of attention to anything but the carnage she's dealing out, indiscriminate.

_"¡Vete a la mierda!"_ Nova shoots a drac through the throat. "I'm gonna _fucking_ kill you!" Nova pours heat and plasma into a drac's middle until its white suit is a seared mass of black and char. 

One of them catches her just under the clavicle with a burst of bright light and a sizzle of cooking flesh. That doesn't seem to stop her. It hardly slows her down. She's still shouting a formless mixture of words in two different languages.

"Your _six,_ Nova." Doublestar almost sounds exasperated.

"Piece of shit _cabrón,"_ says Nova, as her raygun fizzles empty, dead of charge. Undeterred, she whips the next drac across the face with it instead.

Even once all the dracs are either running for their lives or smoking bodies in the sand, Nova doesn't stop. She turns on her heel and grabs her brother by his shirt-front, hauling him to his feet with alarming alacrity, and _glowers_ with enough force to cause her twin to raise his hands, palms out, in the universal gesture of surrender.

"You could've fucking _died,"_ says Nova. "You try to hole up against a dozen dracs and think you can make it out alive? It's only 'cause of our little jet-setter here that you're not _la puta muerte._ You don't even have your _gun."_

"He's faster than I am!" says Coma, sputtering. "Left my gun in the backseat. Couldn't get to it in time, honest."

"Dumbass." Nova winds back, like she's about to shove him. Doublestar catches her on the shoulder - her uninjured one.

"You don't look at that burn, it's gonna come back to bite you." The words aren't quite a command, but they might as well be. The warning is low and intent. "We gotta clear out before someone else comes looking."

She's right. It's obvious that something's happened here, and if more dracs don't come sniffing, then scavengers will. Rats who'll come crawling over the pieces and digging for bones, for something to sell or something to keep.

You can't stay here. So that night, you learn how to treat a flash-burn, while Rocket and Coma carry anything they can salvage out of the wreckage and back to the impromptu campsite you've set out in the shadow of hulking boulder. Nova doesn't cry or whine while Doublestar shows you how to cut away the damaged cloth. Then Doublestar undoes her belt, with its heavy sun-shaped buckle made coppery with rust, and makes Nova bite down on the heat-stiffened leather while she cleans out the mess of burned skin with a flask of water.

She shows you how to peel at the places where fabric became blackened and charred and stuck into the oozing wound. She speaks over every ugly, agonized sound that curdles out of Nova's throat. Every time you look at her face, Doublestar takes your chin in her fingers and firmly turns your head away, and back to your work. 

"The sooner we're done," says Doublestar, "the sooner it's over."

Every muscle in Nova's neck stands out in sweat-slick relief. Tear tracks chase down the sides of her face.

"Wrap it in something clean," Doublestar tells you. She hands you a roll of fabric - spare rags, cloth torn from old shirts. "Clean as you can find it. I'll tell you when they need to be changed."

You don't need to ask how she knows what to do. There are enough burn scars and heat rashes pocking the olive skin of Doublestar's arms, crisscrossing the corded ropes of stringy muscle, for you to know that, like everything else she learned out here, she had to teach it to herself when it came up.

She claps you once on the back when you're done tying a piece of rag around the injury, and you sit back on your heels, shaking.

"You did good. Better than I did, my first time." She holds up her hands, larger and paler and more knobbed with calluses than yours. Even if you're having trouble catching your breath, the subtle tremors wracking her fingers, the little twitches of motion that have always been there, are stark against the stillness of your own smaller, darker fingers. "See? Y'got steadier hands than me. Steadier hands than any of us. 'S why you're such a good shot."

You duck your head, and let the volume of your hair shield the warmth that starts to burn at your cheeks.

"B-better shot than Coma." The words are rasping when Nova mumbles them, but in spite of the thin sheen of sweat glossing her skin, she manages a trembling laugh. Nonetheless, she's still reaching with an unsteady hand to try and paw her vest back over her shoulder. "What was he thinking, sending _you?_ Should'a stayed instead of him."

"You hear that, Coma?" Doublestar raises her voice without looking up, bending over Nova to brace a hand against the small of her back and help her sit up. "You're useless in a firefight! Your _hermana_ here had to do all the fighting for you!"

"Tell her to shut the fuck up and lie down!" says Coma. 

Nova flips her middle finger in his vague direction, then promptly winces.

"Sleep," says Doublestar, her tone lapsing back into one of familiar firmness. "You did good today, but now you gotta sleep it off. Let's get you somewhere safe."

There's no "safe" out here. The safest place you had was the camper van, and that's long past saving now. You watch as Rocket and Coma pick through what little they could save. Coma's partway through counting carbons when his raygun, painted orange as the sunset, strikes him on the back of the head. You remember when Doublestar told him off for painting it, just like when she told off Nova for dying her hair and wasting the resources, but the threat of her admonishment hasn't once stopped them. You're not killjoys, fighting on the frontlines. Doublestar doesn't believe in crusades and burning down BLi. She believes in survival, which is why she throws Coma's gun at his head by way of reprimand.

"Ow!" Coma rubs at the back of his head, swiveling around to glare at her.

"Don't you ever keep your gun that far away from you," says Doublestar, stumping over to the rest of you. Behind her, you can see the mound of shed jackets that's serving as Nova's bed for the night. She needs it more than any of you do. "You keep your gun _close._ You understand? 

_"Sí, sí,_ okay, I got it!" Coma snatches his gun from the sand and holds it up obligingly. "Keep my gun close. I gotcha."

"You're lucky that our jet-setter here still had _his."_ There's that word again. You don't think you've heard it before, but you can guess at what it means. Doublestar nudges you with the toe of her boot. You rock forward, duck your head. "Fastest pair of legs in the Zones, aren't you?"

"Jet-setterrrrrr," says Coma, drawing the word out with a purr. He pokes you on the shoulder. You look up, and his grin is a wide, white crescent set into the brown of his face. "Shootin' like a comet all over the Zones! Thanks for saving my _culo,_ all right?"

"Don't make a habit of it," says Doublestar, but the words are bereft of bite. She's done all the teaching that she intends to do for the day.

"C'mere, Jet-setter." Coma slips his sunglasses off his forehead and jams them onto your face, ungracefully. He nearly takes out your eye. You don't mind, though, as you fumble to hold them in place. "You save me, you help patch up my sister - you're pullin' your weight, _hermanito."_

"It's 'cause he was born out here," says Rocket, quietly. Their smiles are smaller, almost uncertain, but their rarity makes them worth it every time.

Coma barks out a laugh. "Yeah, ha ha! Not like us City freaks."

He reaches over again and musses your hair with one heavy palm. He almost knocks you over with the force of it, and his sunglasses are too big for your face. 

You keep them there anyway, and when no one's watching, you grin at the ground.

**\--**

**look up  
realize that this is not the end**

**\--**

Rocket's right.

You're a better shot than anyone else in the crew, even Doublestar. Your hands don't shake, and your heart doesn't go into palpitations, and you don't have to stomach cold sweats and shivers and night chills the way the others do. You've seen it happen. Rocket gets it the worst and the most often, beanpole as they are. Less insulation against the drastic weather shifts in the desert, maybe. Whatever the case, they can't run as fast, they can't shoot as well, they can't carry as much.

It bothers them more than it bothers any of you. You know it does. They push themself far past what they can handle, even when Doublestar tells them they shouldn't. Break your body, and the whole group will suffer for it, she warns.

"Stop it," mutters Rocket, when you hold out your canteen for them for the umpteenth time. "I told you, 'm fine."

Their dark skin is slick with sweat underneath the blaze of the midday sun, and their dreads hang lank. The light throws the ashen quality to their complexion, and the places where their skin has torn open, rashlike, into even harsher relief. You know they were up for the entire evening prior, retching into the sand and shaking like a tumbleweed.

But Doublestar says you need a new car, and Rocket wouldn't let you hunt around the getaway mile in search of one on your own. That's where you can find the most wrecks and the most spare parts, assuming someone else doesn't get there before you do. Everyone else is off stalking a satellite that Doublestar predicts is due to hit Zone Seven come nightfall, and it's important that they get there before the dracs do.

Your glares don't have quite the same effect as Doublestar's, and yours is ultimately wasted on the back of Rocket's head. They're moving unsteadily in front of you - not quite limping, but close enough. They're still favoring one side of their body, like they have ever since an earthquake crumbled a large chunk of the ground and sent Rocket pinwheeling down one of the bluffs of Zone Six. They landed unevenly, and _something_ had cracked in their abdominal region. The most they can do now is stay off it as much as they can.

They're not really doing that, currently.

"Up ahead," says Rocket, pointing. The shimmer of the morning heat-waves make it hard to distinguish what, exactly, they're pointing at, until the dark lump on the horizon resolves into a shape approximating a car. A _whole_ one, even. It might be broken and half a wreck, but if enough of it is intact, that might make it salvageable. It makes the fact that you're pushing this trek far past advisable hours, into the hours when the sun is at its zenith, more than worth it.

You set off at a dead sprint, overtaking Rocket easily. They shout something from behind you, but the words are lost in the roar of the hot desert wind as you draw closer to your prize. It's smaller than the camper van, but it looks like it still has most of its wheels - a _real_ prize off the getaway mile. It must be a fairly new addition. You've walked this stretch dozens of times before and never seen it. Someone must have left it there. Someone must have been by recently. Someone must have -

Someone starts shooting.

You skid to a halt with enough force to end up on your side. The sand scrapes at your thigh through its worn layer of denim. Several more bright bursts of energy course over your head with the high-pitched shrill of laser fire. Rocket's already covering you with a few well-aimed shots that glance off the car frame and further blacken its dented exterior.

You've got no cover. You have to move up, or you risk making yourself an even more prominent target. Taking them on up close gives you a better fighting chance than letting them pick you off safely from a distance.

It's hot and dusty, crawling on your elbows and knees over the sand, but when the first head pokes out from behind the car and aims for you directly, you give up on creeping forward and paw for your raygun at your hip. It's rush them or die. It's rush them or watch Rocket get shot. It's rush them or lose the only vehicle you've spotted for miles.

You rush them.

You catch one streak of plasma across the shoulder, barely a graze, but it lights up your nerves in a wirework of kerosene. The other clips you across the thigh, burning through the abraded fabric of old jeans. Instead of vaulting over the car's dirt-worn chassis, a move you've seen Nova execute several times prior, you crash ungracefully into it from the side.

You hear your name torn from Rocket's throat - _"Jet!"_ \- and throw yourself to the ground in time for another crackle of electromagnetic energy to shoot out over your head. You look up, and you get a clear shot, and less than a second to evaluate whether it's worth taking.

The first time you kill someone, it isn't a drac, and it isn't BLi. You'd like to say that you didn't realize you weren't firing at the crisp clean white of a draculoid's suit, but cratered and scabbed-over red. It would be nicer and easier for everyone to say that you didn't know what you were doing, that you were acting on instinct.

To an extent, you were. But you know better than to hesitate. You hesitate, you're dead. You don't have time to worry and wonder about _you or them_ or who they might be or whether they can be reasoned with. They're shooting at you. If you give them another opening, they'll shoot again, and every second you're in a firefight is another opportunity they have to ghost you on the spot.

You're a better aim than anyone else you know. Your shot snares the wavehead cleanly in the throat.

When they keel over onto the hood of the car, their fellow hasn't even realized that they're dead until you're standing, and Rocket's catching up to you from behind. Their shots don't hit, but they drive the other wavehead back. The wavehead finally seem to realize that their friend is smoking silently on the ground, and you catch a pair of dark, beady eyes pinning you with a look of absolute fury before they turn tail and run. 

You let them go. You don't have any reason to shoot at their back.

"Fuck," says Rocket. They're almost doubled over, hands braced across their knees, breathing hard as they squint through their sweat at the concave arch of dead, smoking wavehead on the ground. "What's a couple of sun-junkies need with a car?"

You crouch over the corpse without answering. They don't have much in the way of clothes, but you know better than to walk away without at least checking them over. It's common sense. If you don't, someone else will. You turn out their pockets, but they're bare. Their skin is little more than patchwork rashes of burn scarring and heat-cooked flesh. All they had, seemingly, were the thin clothes on their back and the gun at their side.

It's a cheap thing, but you pocket it anyway. It can still fetch a handful of carbons.

"Jet?" Rocket's voice is soft. You still haven't turned around to look at them. You can't imagine what your expression might be right now. You picture Doublestar, and the face she always has: set jaw, brow furrowed, clad in iron and sternness and refusing to let anything ever, ever get to her. You clench your teeth, and look back to them.

Their dark eyes search yours for a long minute.

"We need this car," says Rocket. "We need it."

You nod.

Rocket's from the Lobby - the Bat City slums. They don't mention it often, but they've mentioned enough for you to know that this isn't the first time they've had to ghost someone else just to get by. It was androids preaching the Graffiti Bible in the Lobby streets that drove them to the desert, away from the monochrome violence of the City, with the verses of brimstone and hell's fury on their lips.

They know what it means to have to hurt someone to get what you want - what you _need_ to survive.

"They don't need it," says Rocket. Their breathing is starting to re-regularize. "I mean, fuck, what do waveheads need with a car?" Rocket stares at the limp shape on the ground, then scowls and turns their attention to the car - the real prize. "I'm betting you now the tank is empty."

There's no room for guilt in the desert. There's no room for anything but survival. They shot first, and you returned fire. If you didn't, it'd be you smoldering in the sand instead.

Doesn't make it right. It's just how it happened.

The sound of death is mostly silence, but for the drip of red moistening the sand, and the soft curl of smoke from the crater a raygun blast left in the tissue of the wavehead's throat. Mostly, it's a thin sliver of gray in your mind's eye, unspooling into a deep and festering scarlet beneath.

Waveheads don't have masks that you can pick off the ground and send to the Witch.

You raise your strand of beads to your lips regardless.

**\--**

**realize  
we will still be there tomorrow**

**\--**

Death doesn't happen in a vacuum. Death happens only once to a corpse; to everyone else, it lasts much longer. These are the things you consider in the wake of your first real kill, in the privacy of your head while you stare at the scatter of stars without seeing them.

"Got one!" Nova's shout is triumphant. She bounces on the spot, pointing at the distant smear of starlight against the smoky black of the night sky. She's been spotting all night. It's her turn, but she also takes Coma's shifts whenever she can. Sometimes she lets you sit out with her, head leaned against her shoulder, just watching the infinite swirl of galaxies and speckled stardust. _Constellations,_ she calls certain clusters of lights, but she doesn't know the names of any of them, so you and her make up your own.

You follow her finger to the base of what you and her have jointly dubbed The Broken Vee-Eight, and sure enough, there's a bright light pulsing closer and closer. Anyone unused to the concept of satellite chasing might mistake it for a falling star. You've watched the night skies enough to know better, to distinguish between meteorite and repurposed BLi satellite.

Doublestar is already awake. She wakes easily. Easier than Coma, who, true to his name, tends to drowse whenever he has a spare five minutes to close his eyes. Doublestar is at Nova's back in a heartbeat, hand on her shoulder, watching closely.

"Good work, Nova." Her tone is one of distraction, but Nova's chest swells with pride regardless. Then she looks at you. "Jet. She found it, so you're gonna figure where it lands. Okay?"

Your heart thuds in your chest once, like a drumbeat. You can feel the physical block in your throat when you swallow, hard.

"You got this, motorbaby." Doublestar pats you across the back, once. "You know how to do this. I'll check your work."

Nova hunkers down to keep watching the stars. Behind you, in the seats of the car you and Rocket scavenged from the pair of waveheads, Rocket and Coma continue to slumber in silence.

It's not that you haven't done this before. But Doublestar's always walked you through it, gently corrected you when you've gone off the mark, and now she expects you to do it on your own. If she thinks you can do it, it means that she thinks you're _ready_ to, so - 

You don't have the luxury of paper or pens. You do most of the work in your head. You remember all the important parts: what a satellite looks like when it's heading back to earth, how long it takes, the arc and trajectory of metal in the sky as it reenters the atmosphere. Doublestar knows all the numbers, made you recite them until you could repeat them from memory. When you need to remember a variable, you write it in the sand with your fingertip.

Result: due to land in at a specific point in Zone Four, twenty hours from now. Doublestar considers your answer with her lower lip caught beneath her uneven, worn-down teeth, before she nods.

"Think your location's a little off, but you got the general gist." Then she frowns. "Gonna take us mighty close to Mega-Moon's, though."

"Mega-Moon's?" Nova leans back a little to listen, though she doesn't take her eyes from the stars.

"Wavehead bar." Doublestar's voice is grim to match the sickening thud to your heart. "Not somewhere I'd like to vacation. We'll be quick."

Wavehead bar. 

Will the people there know you? Will they know you shot one of their own?

Your fingers skate at the beads around your wrist, twisting them around with a fervency that Doublestar must notice, because her eyes meet yours and her expression is serious.

She knows what has you on edge.

"We'll be quick. In and out. No one'll see us, crash-baby."

She's wrong about that one. Twenty hours later, the car's motor hums faintly with the smell of exhaust at your backs. It's evening, peak hours for most anyone who lives in the desert. It's not peak hours for waveheads, picking up windblown highs from the UV rays over their heads. No one would assume that they'd be nosing around after dark, once they've had their fill of the sun's radiation. It makes sense, given all you know about waveheads.

But when a satellite craters in the sand barely a quarter-mile away from Mega-Moon's, a rickety building with its lights still on and a neon sign like a green beacon in the purplish dusk, it's a calamity significant enough to rouse even heat-sick waveheads from their holes to come crawling out and see what's landed on their turf.

"Pornodroid," says Coma, plainly bored as he stares at the steaming remains - just-landed, and far too hot to touch. He crouches at the edge of the crater, while Nova and Rocket keep eyes for BLi on the horizon.

"Scrap is scrap," says Doublestar. Her eyes flick, briefly, to you and then to Nova. "Good work, you two."

Ordinarily, her compliment would fill you with a warmth that would buoy up in your chest like a bubble of bright, shiny color. Right now, the neon glow in the corner of your eye makes your mouth go dry just by the sight of it.

"First things first." Doublestar turns to the car and pops the trunk open with the well-aimed kick of a boot. "Coma, you and me are gonna do inventory so we know how much of this we can load up to - "

A formless shout at your back is the only warning you get before there's a blinding yellow bolt coursing over your head. You duck far too late, but lower to the ground is better in the dark. It makes you harder to pick out. Already, Coma is firing back, indiscriminately. His shots blitz harmlessly into the evening gloom without regard for targets. It's not suppressive fire in the strictest sense, but it gets them scrambling for cover.

"Waveheads?" That's Nova, dropping low to the ground like you and Doublestar already are, making her way over to the car at a crouch.

"Looks like." Doublestar's assessment is brisk. "We're too close."

"They're shootin' up a lightshow." Coma hits the ground next, once the waveheads start shooting again. The nebulas of reddish dust thrown up by his mad scrabble to get to the car have darkened his hair, pinched his face as he squints through the clouds of it. "BLi's gonna notice."

"Do we bail?" Rocket presses up against the car, one hand already on the handle to the backseat.

Doublestar doesn't answer right away. She peers up, over the top of the car. Swears under her breath when a bolt singes the roof, nearly taking off her fingers.

"For a bunch of sun-soakers, they know how to line up a shot." She spits into the dirt. "Didn't get a headcount. At least three, can't be more than five or six. Jet?"

There's no break in the word. She simply mows from one topic to the next - from a calm situational assessment to a query you knew was coming, because you're the best shot she has. Five or six waveheads in the dark, with no protection at your backs, and she's not looking at you, but you can tell by the stillness in her frame that she's waiting. 

You could shake your head. You could. Would she say no? Would she say that she knows you can do it, shoot them all down without taking a flash to the face, or worse?

You did the math. Nova did the spotting, and you did the math to get you here. Maybe it was the Witch's hand. No - maybe it was Destroya's, guiding you to something that it believed you could overcome. Why come all this way, if you weren't going to try?

Your nod is breathless. Doublestar claps your shoulder, once.

"Atta boy," she says, her grin right-angled and ruthless. "Coma. Rocket. Start loading up."

"What?" Coma looks at her like she's sprouted a second head. "Loading up? You want us to - they're _shooting at us!"_

"Start loading up," says Doublestar, calmly. "Whatever doesn't fit, we leave behind. Jet. Nova. With me."

She doesn't wait for questions. Doesn't wait for clarification. She just starts moving, ducking out from behind the car to start firing, and you're at her back, firing with her, and Nova's behind you both. Coma and Rocket - unfurling from behind the car, running for the depression in the ground, even as the metal still sits steaming. You all lost your fingerprints years ago from handling heated steel, for not waiting long enough for satellites to cool before hauling at them bare-handed.

The waveheads aren't expecting you to rush them head-on. Their rate of fire falters. The show of force has them in retreat, maybe, or rethinking their strategy. Their silhouettes are only a little bit darker than the cold, stained-black sky, but the flares of the muzzles of their guns light up their positions like burning-out stars. 

"BL/ind! BL/ind!" That's Coma, screaming like a stung coyote. You don't need to turn to feel the burn of the headlights at your back, the searchlight glow that makes you a perfect target on two different fronts.

Everyone scatters.

Doublestar shoots off her gun three more times, whirls on her heel, pounces for the driver's seat. Nova keeps up the salvo, a constant bright-burning slew of electromagnetic radiation in the direction of the waveheads as she backs up step by step, makes it to the passenger side, and climbs in. You hit the ground, roll in the dust - sand trickles into your ear, shuts out most of the sound on one side of your head, and you bounce up again shaking your hair like a dog out of water, making for the trunk, grabbing the edge, helping Rocket slam it down. They're wrestling with the door. Trunk's overstuffed, the bulk of stolen metal straining its storage capacity. Behind you both, there's the slap of van doors opening. Coma yanks open the backseat. You can smell the smoke and char on his hands, the burned skin where it's peeling away.

"Start the car!" he bellows. Rocket's still struggling to close the trunk - it won't latch shut. Of the five of you, it shouldn't be the preteen and the sickly crash queen trying to muscle an old car trunk shut, but it's how the math shook out, and then a wavehead shot catches Rocket across the side of their face. They fall at you, _into_ you really, and you stagger in the effort to keep them upright and keep them from taking you both down, until in the next moment Coma's catching you both, hauling you into the backseat. The tires are already spinning in the sand. Exhaust boils out from behind you. BL/ind starts shooting, and the backseat slams in time for two shots to crack the rear window glass.

They're still shooting when the car knifes out into the dark, and then they don't have any time to keep shooting at you, because then they have to shoot at each other. Coma starts laughing, sits up to shout into the dark with hands still sizzling, charcoallike and burned raw - _"Ha ha ha ha! Vete a la verga, you BL/ind motherfuckers!"_

Rocket whimpers, one hand clapped to the side of their head.

In the morning, Doublestar has you cut away the charred mess that's been made of their ear with a heated knife, sterilized by gas fire, so that it doesn't get infected and make them sicker than they already are.

It has to be you who does it, and not just because you did the math, and not just because you're the best shot and you didn't pick off the waveheads fast enough. It has to be you, even when Rocket screams and it makes your heart compress into a lump of dead starstuff that sits heavily in your throat. 

Doublestar says it has to be you who does it, so you do.

You have the steadiest hands.

**\--**

**and know that just because they died  
we don't have to as well**

**\--**

You've spent so much of your life running that you forget what you're running from - what Doublestar is leading you away from. Every day is a new relocation, a long drive, a hunt for water, forever pulling away from the distant thunder of what Doublestar calls _pig bombs._ That's why dracs get so far out here, she says. They're looking for easy targets, a way to cut off reinforcements before they can reach the ranks. That's why you don't carry radios, and why she doesn't listen to DJs. They're all the same, she says. They just want to rope you into their fight against BLi, and she's seen what happens to people who fight BLi.

It's war, she says, and it's not your fight. War's how kids like you get killed, she says. She's not getting you killed.

You've spent your whole lives running from a war you've never seen, but it reaches you eventually.

It's a friend of Doublestar's who makes contact. Skull-'n-Bone is tall and underfed, and their hair is only a few shades darker than Nova's, but they smile easy and laugh even easier. The night they show up, you don't really get the chance to meet them. Instead, they share low, urgent words with Doublestar at the side of a fire while the rest of you are meant to be getting some shut-eye.

Only Rocket's vomiting their guts into the sand again, in the dead of the night. You're awake because Rocket's awake, hunkered down a few meters away while they're miserably sick in the dust. Nobody lets anybody wander around alone out here, especially when they're still adjusting to a partial loss of hearing that - a loss you had a hand in.

Beside the firelight, Doublestar and Skull are talking in low voices. You don't catch all of it, between the sounds of Rocket's retching, but you don't miss much of it either.

" - told you, Skull. That ain't our fight. Seen too many kids get ghosted to send 'em to a battlefield." Doublestar sounds tired, and you frown. She never sounds tired. Gone is the steel in her tone, the matter-of-fact foundation that makes every word sound like a fundamental law of the universe.

_"Kuso_, 'Star, this ain't about the fight." Skull's voice is low and gravelly. The word they use is familiar, though you can't place it. Doublestar's used it before, maybe. "I told you. This is about _survival._ That's what you're about, right?"

"I'm about keeping them _safe."_ That sounds more like the Doublestar you know. Short, sharp, unrelenting. "Don't matter what I gotta do to do it. They're my kids, so I keep 'em safe."

"That's why I'm askin' your help," says Skull. "This ain't no one-crew job. I'm talkin' a full supply caravan. They're haulin' this shit to the Analog frontlines."

_Analog._ You lean closer. You've heard the word before - that's the word that means _war._

"We're talkin' the kinda protein they use to feed _families_ back in Bat City," Skull continues. "We raid 'em, we hurt their fightin' chances, and you never send your kids to bed hungry again. We both win. See?"

Doublestar is silent.

There's another choking, wheezing sound from Rocket, followed by the sound of liquid spattering against rock.

" - need a guarantee this won't go Costa Rica." You miss the first part of what Doublestar says, and strain to pick up the rest.

"You know there's no guarantees of that out here," says Skull. "Never is."

"You're doing this to win the War."

"So what if I am?" Skull's voice pitches upward, louder. "Don't mean it can't still help you too. It's killjoys fightin' this war."

"We ain't _killjoys,_ Skull." The words are hard. "We're just trying to get by."

"You sure 'bout that?" says Skull. "You satellite chasers live just like 'em. Hell, your twins do an awful good impression of a couple'a crash queens."

There's a crunch of shuffling feet and shifting weight. When Skull speaks again, it's so quiet you barely hear it over the crackling of sparking fire.

"You don't wanna do this, I'll find someone else. 'S a two-crew job. But it's free food, dead dracs...we win, the pigs lose. Don't matter why we're doin' it."

The crunch of approaching footfalls drowns out the rest of whatever they have to say.

"Jet?" Rocket's voice is rusty, and even in the semidarkness, you can see them shivering. No more listening in. They're done, and it's time to get them back safe. "What're you doing up?"

You don't say anything. You just take their hand in your own, squeeze it once, and start to lead them back to where the twins are camped out.

It's less of a surprise than it would be otherwise, when the next morning Doublestar tells the four of you that you're going to be helping Skull's crew with a little job.

"What kinda job?" Nova's scratching at the underside of her jaw. A reddish welt has sprung up on her neck overnight. It's not the ugly bruise-color that indicates that she's been bitten by something that'll kill her, and it's not like the lesions that polka-dot Rocket's skin in an uneven patchwork of sarcoline tones, but it's already scabbing over with how often she's picked at it.

"BLi's got a caravan of goods passing through Zone One this evening," says Doublestar. She glances at Skull, sidelong, signals that they chime in with a jerk of her chin.

"It's gonna be heavily guarded." Skull steps forward, hands thrust into the pockets of their jacket - shiny, black, torn-up leather. "Intel says it's some real valuable stuff. Lotta protein, family-sized portions. That kinda thing. You get your ticklers on this, you're livin' well for the whole damn year."

Coma and Nova exchange a look. Rocket rubs at the side of their head, at the place where their ear used to be, a tic they've picked up ever since Mega-Moon's. You turn your raygun over in your hands, wondering how you're going to pretend that this is news to you.

"Gonna be a lotta dracs. Lotta pigs. My crew can't take all this alone, so here's what we're thinkin'. We're thinkin' we get some help, and we split the takings."

"I'm not agreeing to this," says Doublestar, "unless every one of you is in. We do this, we do it together."

Skull looks at her. They look like they're about to say something, for a moment, but they stay silent. Doublestar's eyes flick to theirs only for a moment; there's a challenge set in the tension of her jaw and the slope of her shoulders.

"I'm in," says Coma, with no hesitation whatsoever. Nova shrugs, languid. The studs on her vest glint in the morning light.

"Sure," she says, as if to say, _why not?_

Doublestar looks at you. You hesitate for longer than you mean to before you nod, as though you had to consider it.

Everyone looks at Rocket.

Their lips are pursed, their eyes downcast, arms folded across their chest. There's a specific kind of apprehension that always dogs their footsteps like a second shadow, and then there's the kind of apprehension that you only see when something has them worried beyond their baseline anxiety. Right now, it's the latter eating away at their profile. It's in how they're biting their lip, how they don't seem to want to look up and meet anyone's gaze, how their shoulders are hitching up more and more around the nervous bob of their throat.

"Doublestar?" says Rocket, quietly. They shoot her a look that you can only describe as pleading. From where you stand, you can clearly see the mass of keloid that scabs the side of their face from where you had to carve away their ear.

"I think the odds are good." Doublestar speaks steadily, and she doesn't look away. "Skull's pulled capers like this one before and come out the other side swingin'. I think we could make it."

Rocket's eyes drop. Then, finally, almost timidly, with a wince - they nod.

Skull grins.

"Shi-_ny."_ They clap Rocket companionably on the shoulder, a gesture that you can tell the latter doesn't really appreciate, but Skull doesn't seem to notice. "Let's ruin some pigs' day, yeah?"

There's still worry in the drawn corners of Doublestar's eyes, and in the way her smile is fleeting and uneven, but she jerks her head at the rest of you.

You make good time. The car you and Rocket procured speeds along down Route Guano, while Nova and Coma bicker over kill counts in the backseat with you stuck between them. Rocket's busy counting battery packs, playing shotgun to Doublestar as she keeps her foot on the gas. In front of you, you can hear the music blasting out of Skull's truck. Their car is a heavily rusted thing with hulking tires to match its bricklike frame, and a great tow-hook swinging on the back. You only catch snippets of the sound screaming out from their open windows, loud and furious. It sends little shivers of red through your veins, when you hear it over the twins' arguing, but all you grasp are fleeting snatches of wailing guitars and hammering drums that blend almost perfectly into the smoke-and-gunfire ambience that always plagues Zone One.

It feels wrong to be moving toward the distant roars of bomb-fire and crackle-bursts of explosive energy, rather than away from them.

The sun is slung low in the sky by the time Skull peels away from the main stretch and pulls over in the shadow of an old gas station. One by one, brightly colored tufts of hair peek out from behind corners and edges and start to slink into the open. Skull slides from their truck and jerks a thumb over their shoulder to indicate your busted-up wreck of a car that comes rumbling to a halt just behind.

"Phantomatic, Banshee Blue, Adam Bomb." Skull points out each of their crew, one by one - a dust angel with lime green spikes, a blue-haired motorgoblin, and a pale crash kid with a shaved head who can't be any older than Rocket. "This is that friend of mine I told y'all about. Me 'n Doublestar go back."

"Nova Cane," says Doublestar, indicating each of her own with an inclination of her chin. "Coma Doze. Nine-Volt Rocket. Jet."

She doesn't let the mumbles and vague nods of greeting go on long before she looks at Skull-'n-Bone direct. "We doing this, or aren't we?"

"We're doin' this," says Skull, with a nod. "We got an hour, hour-thirty, maybe, before they come rollin' through. We're a mile or so out. Glory 'n Grinder have the place staked out, keepin' a watch on where the caravan's headed."

"Then let's move." Doublestar doesn't seem to want to spend time on introductions, or much time on waiting in general. There's an energy to her, an immediacy to her motions that doesn't suit her. She's never leisurely, but there's an electric anticipation to the tension in her frame that bleeds out into the rest of you. Your heart thuds all the fiercer in your chest, and there's a tingling in your blood that doesn't have a thing to do with how little you slept the night prior.

You meet the last two of Skull's gang when you rendezvous at the stakeout point. You barely have time for their names, Oxide Glory and the Organ Grinder, before you're splitting up into groups of twos and threes and spreading out, crouched behind the shadows of the rising bluffs and what little scrub there is to hide behind. You and Rocket end up with Skull. Doublestar doesn't say anything, but you can't help but wonder if it was by her insistence, between your youth and Rocket's injury. No point in asking, and no means of it, either; when you split off, it's with the order for radio silence and just silence in general, so it's in the spirit of wordless obedience that you crouch where you're instructed to, raygun in hand, scanning the horizon.

Then everyone settles at their positions in the sinking-sun quiet, and waits.

Waiting's not so difficult. It's difficult for Rocket, who keeps shifting their weight and scratching at the rashes on their arms and the scar tissue at the side of their face and can't sit still in general, but for you, it's easy. You can just lid your eyes halfway and let the world's soundscape scuttle in and out of your head. The quiet sounds of lizards darting over rocks, and the wind hissing at grains of sand, and the faint tremble of the innumerable ordnances many miles off, and then -

The distant growl of a motor.

Skull goes rigid beside you.

_"Ano,"_ they mutter. You don't know the word, but you don't have to. They might as well be pointing.

The bulk of a blindingly white BLi truck is unmistakable. An entourage of dracs mounted on motorcycles encircle it, accompanied by at least four or five cars.

"Hell, they didn't say nothin' about no crows," hisses Skull. There's a faint crease pinching their brow. You stare at them with your question wide in your eyes, but they're not looking at you. They're not like Doublestar and the rest - they can't read you with a glance.

Rocket can, and nudges them instead. "What?"

"Two crows," says Skull.

_"What?"_

"Two scarecrows. BL/ind's best." They trail into a string of words grumbled under their breath, so rapid you barely catch them. _"Kuzu baikoku ujimushi zonbi aobyōtan,_ this wasn't in the DJ's fuckin' intel."

"What do we do?" Rocket's eyes are starting to acquire that wide, glassy look that always pairs with a high, rapid breath. You try to catch their eye next, derail them before they get going, but their gaze is locked on Skull.

Skull's stare stays fixed on the caravan as it rolls ever closer.

"Stick to the plan," they mutter at last. "Don't change nothing. We can take 'em. We got surprise on our side."

The plan entails waiting for the caravan to reach a certain point, the intended site of ambush. Then you hit them from all sides, all at once. It's high risk, but what out here isn't? It was high risk for you and Rocket to try and claim a car off the Getaway Mile without backup. It was high risk to drive all the way out to Zone One, a region eaten alive by war and plasma and mortar fire. It's high risk just to _live_ outside the City walls, Doublestar says.

She said she trusted Skull-'n-Bone to pull this off, with your help. So you have to.

Skull doesn't venture a signal. They simply surge to their feet and over the crest of the bluff you've been using as cover, and start firing below.

Soon enough, the rest of you follow suit. Banshee turns out to be well-named; you hear her loudest, bellowing over the smoke and sizzle of laser fire. You come from all directions. You're shooting from higher up. You're braced on the summits of dunes and bluffs, firing below. The dracs are at a disadvantage. It still doesn't take long before they start shooting back.

Your aim is steady.

You can cut them down as easy as anything. Your hands don't shake. You level your shots on your targets, fire, watch them fall. You've got good aim, better aim than anyone. Your hands don't shake. Your shooting's steady. Soon enough, Skull starts skidding down the sand, moving downhill, closing in on the prize. The truck's ground to a halt, heavy and armored thing that it is, while the dracs marshal around it. It's their only cover.

Doublestar told you to stick with Skull, so you follow them down with one hand catching at the sand to keep you from falling flat on your face. A streak of laser sizzles the air just above the top of your head. You duck reflexively, too late for it to make any difference, but you keep shooting when the time allows. You can't go burning through batteries without any reason. Only take the shots when you know they'll hit - when you know they'll do their jobs.

The gunfire's flying faster. The air is a blur of crackling bolts of energy and the stink of ozone. A drac catches your laser to the throat and grasps at its neck with a strangled, gurgling cry. One of them clips Skull on the cheek. They snarl out a word you don't recognize and return fire with a vengeance.

The Organ Grinder is a giant with fists to match. You watch her pick up a drac and fling it bodily into the BLi truck with a metallic _crash._ You don't have time to keep watching her, though; more dracs are firing your way, and Doublestar, she called your aim better than anyone's, and she was right. You can mow them down fastest, so you have to shoot them before they shoot you or anyone else.

"Jet!" Rocket, at your back. "Behind me. Behind me!"

They're trying to protect you. But you're a better shot than they are. Across the battlefield, Doublestar's making her way toward the truck with her wild mane of dark hair streaming behind her as she pistol-whips a drac across the face and pours flaming neon into its chest. Its front stains red and black, streaming pulp and smoke and char.

At the head of the convoy, one of the motorcycles hasn't stopped, or even slowed down. It's spun around and starts heading for the scattered spots of color in the desert instead. Its rider is helmeted and clad in sleek, dark leather, not draculoid-white.

It's a scarecrow.

You've never seen one up close. You've never seen one before at all.

"Down! Down!" That's Skull, grabbing at the back of your head and forcing you to the ground as the motorcycle growls perilously close. Rocket yelps, throwing themself to one side, barely avoids the tires that threaten to crush their spine like a dead twig.

The scarecrow draws its zap. The first bolt hits Skull's shooting hand, and their gun drops to the ground.

You're supposed to stay with Skull, but Skull's trying to scramble away from the crow before it ghosts them for good. Cast around for Rocket, but there's no telling where, in the chaos, they've ended up.

The plan is to stay with Skull. There is no plan. The plan is to stay alive. The plan is to keep fighting and keep breathing, because the dracs are still shooting but the scarecrows can shoot better than any of them. You glimpse Oxide lying eerily still, dark hair fanned out around her head, her eyes wide and glassy. The atmosphere is sharp with the electric taste of laser fire cut with the stench of cooked meat. The world's a blur of gunfire, smoke, sun-yellow wails. You hear Banshee howl. Nova's shouting words you don't recognize. Coma screams her name.

There's a drac looming large and bone-white in front of you. You snap up your raygun and shoot first. Its gun goes off in the same moment your bolt lands its mark. The laser singes your ear and shears off a chunk of your hair, and you can't prevent the reflexive cry of shock and pain - not just from the sudden sting, but from how the drac falls forward, lands heavily on top of you. The complete, dead weight of it, the too-clean scent of BLi stuck to its suit, pins you to the ground. You can't breathe. The weight's directly on top of your ribs, and you can't breathe. You have to get your arms beneath it, push it off, but your arms are trapped beneath its bulk. You can't take in breath. The air gets darker. Fainter. You can't breathe.

Then the pressure is rolling off of you, and Doublestar grabs you by the shoulders.

"Run," she whispers, raspy. She presses something to your palm. Keys. "Get the car."

There's a frantic light to her eyes.

She told you to run.

You run.

You scramble over the bluffs, slip and stumble over the loose sand, ignore the throbbing at your ear and the way it feels like one side of your face is crusted over with blood. You tear for the car, a blot of dark gray against the blues and purples of the sand, sparsely lit by the setting sun. The sky is a riot of color, the way it always is at sundown, and behind you, you can still hear the screaming.

Trembling hands fumble with the car door. Your legs are too short; you can barely reach the pedals. The tires struggle to pick up traction against the sand before finally the car shoots forward, careens over the dunes, and a blast of laser fire immediately shatters the front windshield. You have to shut your eyes, flinch away from the worst of it. Broken glass cuts into your fingers, but you keep your hands on the wheel. You have to keep your hands on the wheel.

"Rocket!" Doublestar is, briefly, lit up against the backdrop of a liquid burst of explosive, an orange inflorescence that sheathes her in detonation-gold. She points to the car, which you're still figuring out how to stop. "Fall back!"

"Fall _back?"_ Skull is at her side in an instant. "What the _hell're_ you - "

"I told you this ain't our fight!"

Then there's no more time for words. One of the scarecrows has wheeled around, devoting its energy now to charging the pair of them down. Skull hurls themself out of the way. Doublestar doesn't.

She just shoots, empties her gun into the scarecrow's front with a wordless yell that doesn't abate until her rounds eat through whatever layers of protective garb the crow wears and the motorcycle bucks as its rider claps a hand at the brightness that comes crimsoning out of it in a plume of smoke.

Doublestar crouches in time to keep the spinning wheels from taking off her head. She straightens at once, spins to face you. There's a gash at her temple, streaming red down the lines of her neck, and a smoking crater just beneath her collarbone.

_"Car!"_ screams Doublestar. "Get Nova, get Coma! This ain't our _fight!"_

The scarecrow gets to its feet, shaking its head as though merely rattled by what should be a fatal wound. It raises its gun, the barrel stark and blindingly white, but Doublestar spins and seizes its wrist before it can shoot.

Behind you, Rocket scrambles into the backseat, points. 

"They're ahead." Their voice is soft and papery, and your ears are ringing, but Rocket's still pointing - and you see them. Nova's bleeding from somewhere in her middle, sagging against her brother, who has one arm hanging limp at his side.

There's no time to switch seats. Your too-small foot finds the gas, and you speed forward. One of the dracs doesn't get out of the way fast enough, and you and Rocket nearly hit your heads on the low ceiling when the tires catch its body on the way to the twins.

You're too small to be driving. You're not supposed to be driving. Your legs are too short and your hands are too small and your heart's beating too hard in your chest for you to consciously remember what you're supposed to do when you're driving, how Coma did it or how Nova did it or how Doublestar did it. You're just trying not to hit any of Skull's people and brake in time for the twins to clamber into the back with Rocket.

You catch sight of Adam Bomb crawling through the dust at the other scarecrow's feet. It grabs him by the hair, hauls him to his feet, and slashes something across his throat, opening it in a bright red smile. His eyes are open and empty as the weight of his body gapes the wound open to the air, and the gout of madder goes fountaining down his front.

Grinder rushes the scarecrow with a wrenching bellow. You barely manage to twist the wheel in time to swerve the tin can of the car out of the way.

Skull's people are fighting, bleeding, dying. Are they going to get out too? Should you stop for them too? The car's not big enough for all of them. You still need to get Doublestar. Maybe she can drive. She's better at driving than you are, but so is anyone - only Nova's sickly pale and her eyes are shut and Coma's trying to shake her awake but he's only got one arm, and Rocket's eyes are blown wide and their breath is coming out in tight little gasps so you're the only one who _can_ drive, so you spin the wheel and try to turn the car around so you can get back to Doublestar.

She's still wrestling with her scarecrow, her teeth bared in an ugly snarl. It's trying to get its gun up against the side of her head, but she's managed to muscle the weapon so it's pointing away. Several shots blaze out into the gathering dark with a sizzle of colorless light. You slam your foot onto the gas pedal.

There's a pair of headlights trained on the both of them, ensnaring them in a halation of cold silver like a spotlight.

She kicks at the scarecrow's leg. Caves in its knee with a brutal snap. It goes down, rolls to one side with a ragged, pained sound.

Doublestar looks up to you, at the four of you in the car. She makes one frantic, waving motion - _get out of here._

The headlights burn closer.

The truck's motoring for her. She has to move, she has to move _now,_ but the scarecrow still has its gun and it fires. 

The searing gold-white glow of the headlights ignites the dark of her in perfect silhouette as the bolt of plasma catches her across the middle. She staggers back, looks back to the rest of you. Her mouth is open in a yell, but the snarl of the truck's motor drowns out everything else.

You think she's yelling at you to keep running. She's still yelling when you see her go under the tires.

The truck slams into your car head-on, crumpling the hood and sending the chassis spinning out. Your vision shorts out white for the half second it takes for the momentum to catch up to the rest of your body. The seatbelts were all long since melted away the day you found the wreck, so you're wholly unprotected against the impact of an armored BLi vehicle crashing into yours, and your head strikes glass. The jolt unravels barbed wire up along the contours of your skull. Your head is full of lightning - the sound of screams, the color of gasoline catching fire, the sound of lasers breaking glass. The symphony is unbearable, and there's a choir of voices at your back - screaming. There is so much goddamn screaming.

"Drive!" The word works its way to you as though through a thick, impenetrable fog. Your temple throbs. There are spiderweb cracks in the glass from the impact of your head, and you can barely slit your eyes open.

Coma's yelling.

"Drive, Rocket! Drive! Drive!"

You're being tipped out of your seat, shuffled over. Another blast hits one of the windows and powders all of you with broken glass. It's incredible that, in the car at the epicenter of a firefight, there's still glass to break.

You glimpse Rocket, cheeks glistening, eyes pulled wide. Their dreads have fallen into disarray across their face. You glimpse Coma, expression drawn and reddened, uttering a low stream of curses that you can't catch as he hunches in the backseat. You glimpse Nova curled into him, her hair glittering with powdered glass. You glimpse a flash of turquoise in the maelstrom of the combat that you're leaving behind. Crumpled shapes of ash-blasted dracs half-curled on the ground. The white square of a truck, impenetrable, barreling into Grinder with enough force to yank her under the wheels. Skull, hoarse and shouting, scrambling up one of the bluffs. A single, crooked arm bent reverse at the joints, the bony crook of its wrist ringed with a set of bad luck beads.

_You keep all the bad luck on your wrist, it'll never find you._ Doublestar smiles at you, and she smiles the way she always does: uneven and with a subtle pinching at the corners of her eyes. _You always know exactly where it is._

The taste of worn wood beads, when you press them, trembling, to your lips.

_People used to say they came from the Witch._

Your eyes are leaking, but so is the rest of you. Blood from your face, from your ear. Rocket's making low, guttural sounds, their shoulders shaking. Coma huddles against his sister in the backseat. The car rattles violently, shots frying at the years-old paint-job that Doublestar never felt was important enough to fix.

Feels like the lights should be going out, but it's just the sun fading out into the night.

Doublestar's hand on your cheek. Doublestar's nod of approval filling you with helium and puffing up your chest and lifting your chin. Doublestar showing you how to shoot. Doublestar calling you the best shot they've got, because your hands don't shake. Doublestar teaching you how to scratch your name in the sand.

Doublestar's body bowing, convex and wrong, beneath the pressure of a pair of black of tires as she tells you to run.

Coma punches the side of the car, abruptly.

"Fuck!" He hits it, again, again, again. "Fuck them, anyway! _Pinches_ BL/ind stumpfucks!"

Each strike shakes the entire frame. Makes your head throb even more, and you wince, draw in tighter in your seat.

"Coma, _stop."_ Nova's voice is weak and whispery, and her face is ashen. "S-stop."

"Fuck," says Coma. He sinks against her, his eyes screwed shut. _"Fuck."_

In the front seat beside you, Rocket starts to whisper.

"At the end, through the fire and through brimstone, a savior will rise from the earth..."

They know the recitation by heart. They speak it aloud, low and unsteady, as though the words might offer some shelter against what you've all just seen.

You can barely hear the prayer over the shouts and the high-pitched whine of lasers, even as they grow fainter behind you.

In the backseat, Coma starts to sob.

**\--**

**look up  
maybe we're all just broken galaxies**

**\--**

"We're going back."

It's the first thing that any of you say after you make it out of Zone One, and it's Coma who says it. He breaks the weeks-long silence without preamble or fanfare, speaking aloud as though each of you haven't been wrapped away in your own private grief for days now. None of you had anything of Doublestar's to slide into a mailbox for the Witch. As if in compensation, you had whispered for the Witch to guide her soul someplace safe, and touched your lips to the set of beads at your wrist. All else you could do was what she taught you: treat your burns, scavenge for food, and keep running. Keep surviving.

Nova's the first one to break the stunned, empty quiet that follows.

"Are you fucking crazy?"

"Nova," says Coma holding up one hand. She's hauling herself to her feet, marching forward like she isn't still healing from a zap-burn that nearly seared her fucking liver. 

"Going _back?_ What the fuck _for?_ So we can get ourselves fucking killed?" She stabs a finger at Coma's coat, and he flinches. "No. That ain't what Doublestar prepared us for."

"Doublestar's dead," says Rocket. The words are listless, bereft of the typical anxiety that used to twitch their every, tiny movement. "It doesn't matter what she wanted."

"She died keeping us _safe,"_ snaps Nova. "You wanna make that for nothing?"

"It's BL/ind that killed her!" Coma blazes back. "Those fucking pigs ran her the fuck over, and walked away fucking _clean."_

"It was Skull's plan," says Nova. "Skull's plan, and a war that ain't even ours. That's killjoys' war. We ain't killjoys."

"It's our war _anyway."_ Coma flings a hand out to gesture at the expanse of the desert with an open palm. "We're still bleeding for it. They're still killing us for it. If they win, which they _will,_ 'cause it's BL/ind, you think they're gonna care that we're just a bunch'a satellite chasers? They'll call us killjoys, and they'll kill us, or turn us into dracs."

His hands are opening and closing, making fists at his sides and then flexing out again. His shoulders heave. He's pacing back and forth, rubbing at his shoulder in a reflexive tic that he's picked up ever since Zone One. It was a drac that dislocated the limb so severely that he couldn't even shoot. You held him in place when he wrenched his arm in its socket and clicked it back into place, the day after.

"We'll die," says Nova.

Coma scoffs, spits into the sand. "We're gonna die anyway."

"Don't say that," says Nova, at once.

"Why not? It's true, _¿verdad?"_

"Don't _say_ that."

"Everybody dies."

You slide off the rock you've been sitting on, silently, until your feet hit sand. You catch the tremble of Rocket's shoulders, and rest a hand across the slope of their back. They're feverish again, their teeth chattering. Instinctively, they lean up against your touch.

The steady, even massage of your hand up and down the knobby rope of their spine helps them steady their breathing, and it means you don't have to listen to the thrust and parry of the twins at each other's throats. They argue sometimes. They argue all the time, really. It's just that without Doublestar to defuse the overriding tension with a look, it keeps ramping up higher and higher, until Rocket's heartrate jumps up beneath your fingers and you turn around to look at the both of them.

Neither of them are watching.

"If they're gonna poach us like killjoys, we might as well _be_ killjoys!" says Coma.

"Doublestar was right. This ain't our fight."

Your throat is dry and your lips are chapped, but you wet them regardless. Stand up, and lift your chin at both of them.

"Stop it."

You might be quieter than either of them, but the rarity of your words mean that they both stop dead, mid-argument, and look at you.

You don't have a follow-up to that interruption. The words did what they had to, which is cut the fight short before it mushrooms into something so large and sprawling that it becomes unsalvageable. You stare them down, twisting the beads at your wrist until Coma drops his gaze and Nova closes her eyes.

Rocket's breathing starts to even out. You sink back down beside them.

A week later, Coma trades what's left of the car for a radio. Nova calls him a dumbass and a _cabrón_ and a moron. You have to hike your way out of Zone Two on foot while Coma fiddles with the knobs on his new toy for hours on end, dousing the rest of you with static and a wash of ever-changing sound. Some of it reminds you of the music that you caught blaring out of the windows of Skull's truck. Mostly, it just reminds you of what came after. You're getting good at force-swallowing the bile that worms its way up the back of your throat. If you start pitching forward and vomiting, it'll set Rocket off too, send their nausea boiling over, and grind everything to a halt until you can both recollect yourselves. It'll only slow everyone down.

"We need a car, Coma." That's Nova, tucking longer side of her hair behind one ear as the wind picks up and starts to tear at her clothing. She doesn't need to elaborate why. You all know the smell on the horizon - it's acid wind, and you need cover. A car's always been all the cover you need, but without one, it turns the day into a mad scrabble for something that'll hold up against the weather.

Doublestar says, said, _used_ to say - that the world was fucked long before the Helium Wars, but they made it so much worse than it already was. Now there's another war boiling on the horizon, belching heat and smoke and laser fumes into the air and setting the atmosphere on fire, and you're moving away from the bulk of Bat City again, away from Zone One, for all the good it does you.

Coma's not listening. He's twisting the dial on his radio until finally the aural snow resolves into words.

" - DJ Plastic Beat with a weather report." You don't recognize the voice, interlaced with white noise as it is, but it's louder and clearer than anything else has been thus far. "Forecast says: acid wind is bearin' down on us fast, so if you don't have a place to stay, find a rock to hide under quick or start shellin' out c's for a raincoat. It won't keep you from chokin' on the atmosphere, but you'll look good doin' it!"

"Would you stop messing with that thing?" snaps Nova.

"Forecast also says that we're bound to have this weather for a little while, thanks to the massacre in Zone One." You don't know the specifics of that reference. It's not a reference to you, you're sure; it's been weeks since you failed to take down the BLi convoy and paid the price for it. "This concludes our forecast - alternatively known as having _eyes,_ people."

The broadcast lapses into someone speaking rapidly in another language. You catch snippets of words, here and there, something about flash rash and vapors, but the specifics evade you.

"Coma," says Nova, louder. "Shut that box off."

"Maybe they can tell us where to hide," says Coma, without looking up.

"Alternatively called," says Rocket abruptly, from the front, parroting the weather report with a dry aplomb that doesn't really suit them, "having _eyes."_

They're pointing. A warped husk of an old building, halfway caved in from Destroya knows what, sits astride the desert skyline.

You make it inside as the rain begins to fall in earnest. Doublestar told you all about acid rain. She told you how it's not dangerous to the touch, but it's dangerous to wait around outside and breathe too much of the fumes. Finding cover doesn't really avert the risks, but if you're going to be spitting blood and phlegm into the sand, there's no point in being drenched while you're doing it.

Rocket's already beginning to cough. There aren't any doors left, and the walls are missing pieces, leaving you more or less exposed and open to the elements. It's still better than nothing.

The four of you pile inside, and Coma promptly says, "oh, _chale."_

His hand has fallen to the raygun at his hip, but half a second later he relaxes. This isn't the first body you've run into, though it is the first one that hasn't been looted before you got there.

"Shit, that stinks." Rocket wrinkles their nose. "How long d'you think they've been here?"

It's hard to tell. The body crumpled against the wall has skin the color of old newspaper, and there are patches where its pale hair has peeled away from its skull. There's a low, pitched buzzing of things with too many legs crawling underneath its skin, worming into the open gaps of its eye sockets and parted jaw.

Coma reaches down and peels the mask from its face. It's an old, limp thing. It was vibrant and colorful once, probably, but now it's stained and dirty and the edges are fringed with dried blood. He wipes away the red at the edges with his fingertips. Outside, the rain starts to pour in earnest, skittering at the roof and dripping down walls.

"Killjoy," says Coma. He holds up the mask away from his face and looks at you through it, so that his eyes line up with the holes, without putting it on.

"Leave them for the Witch, Coma." Nova crouches and starts going through the dead 'joy's pockets. That's how it is in the desert. You can't simply leave the dead to rot when they might have something that could save your life. They don't need it anymore, so claim what you can and let the Witch have the rest. She doesn't need much to take a single soul from one life to the next.

Coma doesn't answer, but you watch him slide the mask into his pocket.

**\--**

**destined to implode  
and take everyone with us into the darkness**

**\--**

You don't find a car. You find a pair of motorcycles instead, ones that belonged to a couple of dead killjoys, because almost everything out here belongs to a killjoy, or used to. They're still sealed in bodybags when you find them, and their vehicles lie discarded in the dust not a few meters out. Dracs don't care about waste. They leave the desert littered with corpses and detritus and call it clean-up.

You and Rocket share one bike, while the twins take the other. Nova makes you carry the radio on your bike instead of Coma's, because she can't stand the insistent chatter and the rinse of white sound. You don't mind it. The sounds play interesting colors behind your eyes, and as long as Rocket never complains, they can steer the bike while you sit behind them and try to find the best frequency to listen to. Mostly it's old sounds from before the Helium Wars, music with loud, crunching guitars and screamed-out words that make your blood beat faster in your chest. Sometimes it's deejays with words about the "traffic" - how many dracs are in which Zones and for how long they're expected to be there - or the "obits" - who died, and where and when.

Most of the time, you don't recognize the names. You still whisper a prayer to the Witch for them when you can, when you hear them, so those souls don't go shadowing your footsteps and throwing your aim. You're the best shot in the crew. You can't afford to have poor aim, for any reason. Kiss the beads on your wrist, and petition the Witch to steady your hand, if She has the time.

When it's not traffic, weather, obituaries, old music done by bands you don't know the names of, then it's updates on the Wars raging across the desert. 

"Our fearless leader's gotta few words for us now, listeners," says one of the deejays over dinner, which tonight is scavenged cans of over-processed BLi dog food. You look up despite yourself. Coma's gone still, his brow furrowed. "If you're not dying on the frontlines, take a moment to hear her out."

There's a new voice on the radio, powerful and low.

"I know it's hard to keep fighting." You don't recognize the speaker, but there's a charge to her words like the electricity before a storm, like the buzz of a motor tuning up to a climax. Everyone looks up from their meals to listen, even Nova. "It's hard to face an enemy that's bigger than any of us. But if anyone's out there, if anyone in the Zones is listening, if anyone in the City can hear this - please. We need your help. We can usurp the BL/ind and make our own way. But we can only do it if we do it together."

Silence.

"Thank you."

Then she's gone, and the moment's over.

"This is DJ Hot Chimp with the latest," says the deejay, banishing the eerie quiet that follows, "and I'm ready to make some noise if you are."

The broadcast segues into a crash of guitars, and Coma's already standing up. The old killjoy's mask hangs from his belt, where he's kept it ever since he found it, fetched it off the body it used to belong to. Some days, he even puts it on.

"We're going," he says.

"We're _not,"_ says Nova. This is a familiar argument.

"They need us."

"This ain't our fight."

You and Rocket keep eating. In a few minutes, Nova's going to bring up that you're too young to be caught in a warzone. Next, Coma's going to say that Rocket can keep you safe while he and Nova do the fighting. Then Nova's going to say that it's not what Doublestar would have wanted. Coma's going to call her out for holding Doublestar's death over their collective heads after well over a year since.

And so it goes.

"You think you're such a killjoy," says Nova, her tone abruptly scathing. "Dyeing your fucking _hair_ and painting your _gun_ like you're some kinda big _chido_ legend."__

_ _"Oh, you think you're any better?" Coma flashes back. In the half-light of the fire, Nova's hair looks almost green where the evening shadows catch it. She's just dyed it again. "They're why we came out here in the first place! 'Cause they were our fucking _heroes."__ _

_ _"Shut up, Coma." She sounds hurt, and she clearly doesn't have a retort for that. Maybe because it's true. Neither of them have ever mentioned why they left for the Zones. "Just - just - shut up."_ _

_ _Coma doesn't shut up, and eventually, none of you get a choice in the matter._ _

_ _Just like before, the Wars manage to find you instead._ _

_ __ _

**\--**

**maybe we all get swallowed up by our own light  
(tell me again how you feel small)**

**\--**

The four of you get caught in the crossfire by circumstance, but then circumstance keeps persisting. You get pinned down by a handful of dracs, and it's ridiculous that it's a group that's not much larger than your own that manages to hem you in, but they have the advantage of the high ground and you all burned out your battery packs just getting to Zone Six and having to fight every step of the way. The Wars are leaching their way into the Zones, hemorrhaging violence in a progressively outward spread. Dracs behind friendly lines. Doesn't matter if you don't mean to go fighting a killjoys' War or not; by its nature, it reaches you either way.

Boxed in behind your motorcycles, which have become your only cover, as the dracs shoot out the tires and keep you trapped there, and you start counting how many shots you have left. Rocket gives you their gun. Then Coma does, too. You've only got so many chances, and they know you can shoot better than the rest of them.

It backfires when you take the first shot you can. Peg a drac on the chin and watch it go down. One of them gets a shot off at you too fast for you to avoid. It hits you at the elbow, burns through cloth and skin, and you drop to the ground with a wordless cry.

Coma starts swearing under his breath. Rocket tears away a strip of their shirt with their teeth and wraps it around the burn site almost at once. You're grimaced, pressing your face into the baggy, bright green fabric of the shirt bunched at their middle, trying to fight the tears that spring reflexively to the corners of your eyes. You've been shot before. It never gets easier.

Without your steady aim, the rest of the group has to take matters into their own hands. Rocket presses down over the place where the blood's starting to well from the blistering pulse of red unfurling across the crook of your elbow. You bite your lip, curl into them. Bolts of light sizzle at the sand a few feet away.

Coma shoots. Swears. Missed. Passes the gun to Nova, who shoots and lands a hit. Takes aim and has to duck when a shower of laser fire hisses out at the handlebars of her bike. Her shots careen, go off the mark.

A few yards ahead, the radio's still crackling, dropped in the fray.

" - the pigs won't quit, but neither do we," says the DJ, muffled by the sounds of gunfire and the buzz of static. "We have reports that Zones Three and Five are being hit with some of their finest, so either sling those guns or get _moving,_ real quick, or I'll be preaching to blast craters."

The surreality of it sinks its teeth into you from the elbow up: the fact that you might die here, shot to death by dracs while a DJ of the desert chatters about bringing salvation to the Zones, with no idea that some of its denizens are dying to the sound of the broadcast. Maybe that's something that DJs come to expect. With how much of the Wars they cover, they must see an awful lot of dying.

"I'm dry," says Nova. She looks to Coma, who shakes his head. His eyes are drawn at the corners, his expression pinched.

Nova shuts her eyes.

Once they realize that there's no more fire keeping them at bay, they'll come for the rest of you.

The low beat of a throbbing bass aborts the rising tang of despair at the back of your throat. Then there's the high, electric shriek of fresh laser fire, and you don't dare peer up over the curled shapes of the motorcycles that are the only thing that separate you from the draculoids bent on incinerating you. It's not until there's the sound of slamming doors and the crunch of feet over sand that one of you risks peeking out into what's become of your battlefield. Coma's the first to slowly shift out of his crouch, in spite of Nova's hissing disapproval, his off-white tuft of hair bobbing slightly in the currents of wind.

"You kids're still alive?" The vehicle that's come to your rescue is a jeep, heavy and dark, and the man that strides out of it has a set of dark glasses over his eyes. He's older than any of you - closer in age to Doublestar, you think, than Coma and Nova, who are now the eldest of your remaining quartet. It's hard to tell; the desert ages everyone prematurely, outlines them in wrinkles and scar tissue. He whistles, long and low. "Guess I showed up at the right time."

"Saved all our asses," Coma confirms with a shaky laugh. "We were just about ready to charge all of 'em, go down screaming."

"For the best you didn't," says the man in the dark glasses, but he sounds almost approving. 

Rocket helps you stand in spite of wobbling legs. Their makeshift bandage is soaked through already. Lasers might burn hot, but not enough to cauterize the smoking bullet holes they leave behind. This is by design. Doublestar used to say that back when people fought with bullets, they created each one so that it would break and disseminate damage into as much of the body as possible. The switch to lasers made the wounds too clean for everyone's liking, but it saved a lot of power in the long run. So they devised ways for the shots to still hurt, to not burn so bright that they seared the injuries into being sealed shut.

"You alone out here?" says Coma. He's the talker, usually, especially now. Nova's too busy assessing the damage to your bikes, and Rocket's still keeping you upright.

"For the most part," says the man in the glasses, inclining his head and sticking out his hand. "Dr. Death Defying. Relocating to the frontlines, same as you, I'd wager."

Coma grimaces as he takes it. "Not really, actually."

"No?" There's an inquisitive drawl to the word.

"No," says Nova, who's squaring up to stand beside her brother. "It ain't our war."

The tableau she forms standing side by side with Coma, their hair dyed and their clothes neon, says otherwise.

"I see," says Dr. Death, running a hand through his long, dark hair. The glasses perched on his nose give nothing away, but his tone closes up. It's not hard to guess why. "My mistake."

Does he regret wasting time on a group of zone rats who don't dare call themselves killjoys, who might not have done the same for him?

"We chase satellites," says Nova, even if you haven't in a while, really. Not since Doublestar. "We don't fight wars."

"No reason you can't do both," says Dr. Death. "If we don't reclaim the desert, the pigs'll just up and take it. And where'll that leave the rest of us?"

"You make a good point," says Coma, looking to his sister sidelong. He puts a little too much emphasis on the words, his eyes narrowing. She doesn't return his gaze.

"Thank you," she tells the doctor, firmly, "but we need to be moving on."

The doctor inclines his head. You think you feel his gaze drift to you, but he doesn't say anything. He's probably not a real doctor, and you know how to handle being shot. If he has reservations about someone of your apparent age, little more than a kid, being driven around by a bunch of other kids, he doesn't voice them aloud. 

Instead, he gets back into his jeep.

"Hey!" calls Coma, abruptly, hand cupped around his mouth. The doctor leans out of his jeep's open window, head cocked to one side. Coma bounces on the balls of his feet for half a minute, as though caught in a moment's indecision, then: "where're you headed?"

"Zone Five," says Dr. Death, without missing a beat. "My brothers need me out there."

Coma's dead quiet for half a beat, like he wants to say something and can't think of what.

"Good luck," he says, at last. The doctor looks as though it's the first nice thing someone's said to him in weeks, and shoots Coma a lazy, two-fingered salute as he guns his jeep's engine and starts rolling out across the sand again. Soon enough, there's nothing left but the smell of exhaust and the shivering dots of his tail-lights on the horizon.

"Coma." Nova's tone is slow and heavy, a warning wrapped up in two syllables.

"We have to go." He almost sounds pleading as he says it. "We have to help. He helped _us."_

Your days are consumed by this, have been for months on end now - feverish arguing between a set of twins who don't want to acknowledge what the other is saying. You and Rocket head back to the bikes in tandem, because once the two of them get going, nothing short of a force of nature can cut this disagreement short. It's not an argument that's ever been settled or ended. There are only pauses and interludes, stretches where between the buzz of tires over sand and the zap of rayguns going off and the chatter on the radio, there's no time for the altercation to resume.

Neither of them have asked either of you to weigh in. It doesn't really matter that much. No matter the solution, they've already decided that neither you nor Rocket will be involved, without consulting either of you.

Neither of you have challenged this.

You don't head to Zone Five.

You comb the very fringes of Zone Six for a place to sleep, and end up bunking down beneath the skeletons of some old highways - concrete behemoths that rear into the star-speckled night. Your arm still aches, though some of the burning of the initial shot has subsided, at last. You'll have to learn to shoot with your other hand until it heals.

For the first time in months, you lie awake watching the dark basin of the sky for the telltale streak of light that indicates the presence of a satellite, cometing through the night to land with a warm glow in the sands. Remember how Doublestar taught you how to calculate the arcs and trajectories, how to gauge where the metal might end up, and tally it against the average response time for BLi reclamation trucks to reach the edge of the smoldering crater. The numbers are still easy to remember, black on white against your lids. _Heading back toward the Zones at a steep angle, at approximately thirty thousand miles per hour, a BLi-sanctioned satellite is built to last the turbulence of atmospheric re-entry and land in a position that is easy for Better Living officials to access..._

Frothing static cuts into the texture of your thoughts. You sit up.

"We have an emergency alert for anyone close to Zone Seven," says a voice you recognize as one belonging to the DJ, the one calling themself Plastic Beat, in a hushed undertone - very unlike their typical, bored drawl. "Some of our brothers behind enemy lines have reported high activity in Zone Seven. We've got dracs. We've got latex tides moving fast as you can blink, transporting something big. Something very, very big."

You're not the only one sitting up. Now Rocket is bolt upright, and pretty soon, so are the twins.

"Some of them think - " The broadcast halts. There's a scratch, like a hand being pressed over a microphone, and then muffled words. A low, clearly audible curse. "High likelihood that it's a bomb. Something big enough to vaporize half a Zone."

There's a sound of something thumping, and then raised words, like shouts through a closed door.

"Fuck! Fuck. If anyone's out there - if anyone can hear this - _stop them."_

The unmistakable sound of splintering wood.

"You have to stop them. If _anyone is out there_ \- "

The crack and _slam_ of something being broken open.

_" - DO SOMETHING - "_

The high, electrical whine of a laser blast.

_" - ZONE SEVEN! COME GET ME, YOU FUCKING PIGS - "_

There's another flurry of raygun fire, and then the frequency slams into pitched static, a screeching, uneven tone that persists for several minutes before the broadcast finally, mercifully, cuts itself short.

And then there's nothing but the near-silent buzz of dead air.

"Zone Seven," says Coma, softly.

"Coma," says Nova, but the word is devoid of its usual warning. It sounds strained.

"You heard them, Nova." Coma's fists are balled up in his lap. His bleached white hair almost glows in the purple-dark of the desert nighttime. "I mean, you _heard_ them. It could ghost half a Zone. Maybe more. We don't know. We're _right there._ We can - we might be able to _stop_ it."

"Against _how_ many dracs? We can't take those kinds of odds, Coma."

"If we _don't_ \- "

"We have to try." Everyone else falls silent, when you say it. It's clear from the way that no one else speaks for a long moment that none of them expected it - expected you to weigh in.

"Jet," says Nova, and the word sounds like it might break in two.

You don't speak again. You just stand up, start picking up the tatters and rags and blankets that you use as bedding when you can. The desert nights are cold, biting right through your skin and straight to your bones, but moving helps. Your blood feels sluggish. It doesn't feel right that there's a numbness to your skin when every other part of you feels as though it tingles with pins and needles.

"We just heard it happen, Nova." Coma scrubs at his face with both hands, but he speaks low, as if you can't hear him. "We just...we just heard it happen. They died getting that out to us. Don't matter if it ain't our _fight._ If we don't, what happens next? What if that's it? What if it smokes the entire desert?"

Nova doesn't have an answer to that.

"We can't afford to look away from this," says Coma. The words are barely more than a whisper, but they carry. "We can't."

"Jet," Nova says at last. She's only partially addressing you. "We can't..._you_ can't."

What she says is _you can't._ What she means is she doesn't want to watch someone else in her crew die.

"So let him come with me," says Rocket, speaking up for the first time, their head angled so that they can still catch the conversation with their good ear. "You and Coma can head to Zone Seven. I can take Jet as far away as we can go."

To take you both out of the anticipated blast radius. In case it's a bomb, or worse. In case it really can vaporize half a Zone's worth of mileage, or more.

You're a better shot than any of them, but they still want you safe more than they want a laser bolt through a draculoid's eye, for no other reason besides the fact that you're the youngest - besides the fact that you've collectively already lost Doublestar, and the thought of losing anyone else is unbearable. The natural dynamic fell to pieces when Doublestar went under the tires, disrupted beyond the salvaging of it. Doesn't matter if you know how to handle a firefight. Doesn't matter if you can shoot straighter than anyone else in your crew.

You're just Jet, zonerunner and teenager and younger than everyone else, and you and Rocket look out for each other the same way Nova and Coma do.

It makes sense, with the way things have gone, for you to split up if it means that the twins can offer their help to avert whatever catastrophe is brewing.

Even in the dark, you can see Nova hesitate. "Rocket," she says slowly.

"Nova, come _on."_ Coma's on his feet, bristling. Ready to cave in draculoid skulls and bombard exterminators with a barrage of plasma and laser blasts. His anticipation is a chemical tang in the breeze, a prickling-static and material thing, like the air before a storm. "If we don't, who else is gonna try?"

Two satellite chasers up against something so big that it killed a DJ, live and on the air. 

"Bet thirty c's that you won't be alone," says Rocket, a stab at levity that fails when they start to cough almost immediately after, hand cupped around their mouth. Even in the bluish cast of night in the Zones, you catch the ink-dark spots of blood dotting the sand beneath their feet when they shake their fingers.

Coma's grin is bone-white. In the dark, it's almost blinding.

"You're on."

And how do you argue against that, really?

He and Nova mount one bike, and you and Rocket take the other. You separate to the thick stench of exhaust and the growl of tires over sand. With the volume of a motorcycle's engine, it's impossible to trade anything in the way of words or gestures to communicate. You merely hug Rocket around their middle, their too-narrow solar plexus and their too-fragile ribs, in a way that's fast becoming habit to you.

Half a night of hard driving doesn't take you out of Zone Six, but it can take you to the edge of it.

It doesn't take you far enough to escape the low-level rumbling pulse behind you. 

You manage to wrench your head around a mere half-second before Rocket brakes, twists the bike to one side to stare back at the horizon that's been lit in a hellish, coal-red glow. For a moment, it looks the way the sky would look at sunset, but the sun's already long since sunk, and that's not the right position for it to be crouched behind the sands. The gold fingers of light spilling out from the skyline of Zone Seven illuminate the underbelly of the clouds of blackish smoke as they stream thickly into the night.

You and Rocket stare into the burnt orange canvas of the sky - a perversion of the setting sun.

Then, at your back, a buzz of static kicks to life. Rocket's eyes meets yours in a haunted, fading realization.

Coma's radio.

In his haste to get to Zone Seven, he must have left it behind. Left it with both of you, instead.

" - Zone Seven is on fire. _Repeat,_ Zone Seven is on _fire."_ DJ Hot Chimp's voice is torn through by crackles of aural snow, ripping the words into fragments. "We have casualties. We have _heavy casualties._ We don't know how many - !"

The silence between you has a tangible weight.

Months after, they'll call them the Fires of 2012 - when a combined bombardment of pig bombs and high-density ionizing radiation incinerates most of Zone Seven in an unholy blaze and puts an end to the Analog Wars. The parts of the Zone that are not wiped from the map in the initial salvo are eaten alive by the flames that ravage the wasteland for weeks after, chewing up scrub brush and trees. High winds whip up handfuls of embers, glistening like reddened stars, into the sky and pitch them, swirling, into other Zones. The survivors: reduced to screaming, burning chunks of meat whose molecules quickly begin to cannibalize themselves. Those who do not die in the initial ordnance die slowly, over a period of days and weeks and even months as they suffer cellular degradation and their bodies wither in a nest of tumorous growths. The Zone itself: a smoking, blackened, uninhabitable husk so dense with radiation that only slivers of it are still traversable. It's inadvisable that anyone try to cross it into what's beyond. It's inadvisable that anyone attempt to leave the Zones via that direction at all.

Better Living is credited with the eventual extinguishing of the fires. Better Living is credited with thousands of lives saved.

Hundreds of killjoys and zone rats dead in a single night, and even more in a matter of weeks. There are victory anthems blaring on fifteen different radio frequencies, the strength of their signals cutting into the pirate airwaves that zonerunners annex away for their own channels. Every one of them proclaims the leader of the killjoys subdued and the revolution ended.

What you remember most about that night: the radio frequencies, sporadically fizzling between panicked DJs trying to memorialize the names of the dead and failing to categorize even a fraction of them, and the hollow wailing of a thousand voices lifted in dread and grief. 

What you also remember: the slope of Rocket's shoulders, shaking, their hand pressed to their mouth, their cheeks slick and their expression frozen. Utter numbness blanketing you inch by inch. The way that the horizon's rich red hue was too vibrant to feel real. The way the cinders colored the sky above your heads a pale and dusky purple, as the flakes began to dust your shoulders and stick to your hair.

When the morning comes, with a brittle and biting chill the way all desert mornings come, it feels wrong for the sky to be a cold orange, for puffs of ash to be drifting from above like snow.

Coma Doze and Nova Cane are not listed among the dead. They are, officially, one of the nameless hundreds that simply could not be accounted for in the chaos of that singular event. They are, technically, simply _missing_, and are never proclaimed to be one of the four acceptable levels of dead. You don't get a single instant, frozen forever in grotesque tableau, that commemorates the circumstances of their deaths the way you do for Doublestar.

You remember, forever, the taste of ash in the back of your throat. It sticks to the roof of your mouth. It itches in your lungs, makes you cough, makes you gag. For weeks, it lingers. Makes every breath hurt, like trying to swallow a mouthful of tacks.

The uncertainty of the Fires doesn't claw at you the way you think it should. It doesn't eat you alive the way you think it does Rocket.

Nova and Coma are gone.

You pray to the Witch in silence exactly three months after, and make a midnight trek to the nearest mailbox to leave behind Coma's radio and a woven hair-tie that Nova once used to pull back your unruly locks while she cleaned a gash in your cheek. Kiss the beads on your wrist. It's courtesy; in case the blast did not, by some miracle, vaporize them immediately, in case they did not bleed out in shock from craters in their chests and stomachs and from missing limbs, in case they died slowly and in pain as the metastasizing growths overtook them, you pray for their souls _now_, so that the Witch takes them onward.

It's courtesy.

You pray that it was quick. You pray that they are carried on.

You pray months after the fact, even if you think - you suspect - that they both faded out the night it happened, and that you and Rocket breathed them in with the smell of smoke. You think that their dust still coats your lungs.

**\--**

**look up  
know that i will still love you**

**\--**

You and Rocket drive.

Rather, Rocket drives, and you let them take you wherever they think you both should go. Radioless, mapless, and hopeless, you have nowhere to go but _further,_ and so you go where the weather allows. You go where the dracs aren't. You go where you won't get jumped by crash queens with a raging grudge against BLi and no one else to burn their anger out on. 

You rub Rocket's back when they wake up, convulsing and spitting stomach acid into the dust. They make you sleep through the day when you've taken too many watches and your eyes start to itch, your nerves shot and your hands beginning to tremble. You can't afford to be knocked off-kilter. You're the best shot that you've got. You were the best shot when there were five of you and now that there's only two of you you're still the best chance that either of you have.

You don't trade words for weeks at a time. Neither of you have to. Most of the time, there's nothing to say, and no radio between you to fill the void with meaningless chatter.

Rocket drives. The bike burns gas, and you have to spend nights switching off who dozes and who keeps awake to make sure that no one tries to ghost you in your sleep. There are days when you brace yourself for the sensation of a gun at your back, strain to pick out familiar silhouettes coasting closer, and there are days when you swear you can hear Coma's loud laughter while Nova's cheek-to-cheek grin hovers at your shoulder. There are days when Doublestar's words hang heavy in your soul.

You have to stay awake. You have to keep running and fighting and bleeding. Thirst drives you to the edge of Zone Three, thirst and the fact that the bike is starting to squeal in such a way that means it's in need of maintenance. Badly.

You're learning the gaps in the things that Doublestar taught you, and the things she never got around to teaching you. The things she perhaps expected she would have time to teach you, and never did. Neither you nor Rocket know anything about how to patch a motorcycle. You know how to change tires on a car, but not how to lubricate the chains on a motorbike when they start to wear. You know how to fire a gun, how to calculate the predicted trajectory of a satellite when it crashes into the desert, how to treat a laser burn, but not how to tie a tourniquet.

The first mistake you make, the first _real_ and honest failure in strategy that costs you and that doesn't come down to not shooting the right people or being in the wrong place at the wrong time, is in leaving Coma's radio for the Witch in the first place. With no radio, you're driving blind. With no flow of news haunting the buzzing air freqs, you have no way of knowing how BLi is taking advantage of their victory and pressing the high ground when they have it. You can't know that killjoys are being pixelated at unheard-of rates, that exterminators are fanning deeper and deeper out into the desert, emboldened by their triumph in Zone Seven.

They catch up to you in a gas station, in the middle of refueling your shared bike. 

Old rats like to man stations like these ones, keeping the place powered and fueled and running so that 'joys with a need for shelter or gas have to tip them a few carbons to get a topper. Most of them take after the killjoy tradition, even if they're not aligned with their fight in any official sense, clad in old bodysuits and masks to keep their faces hidden from prying eyes.

The rat who's been watching you fill your tank is quick to move to the back of the station, accustomed as they must be by now to BLi storming their place of work. That's the only warning you get before the cloud of dust in the distance starts to resolve into the shape of a car - too white, too clean, and too bullet-like in shape to be anything but BLi.

You tug Rocket's sleeve, hunker down behind one of the counters. The car's far out, but getting closer - already too close for you to drive off and hope they missed you. They'll be able to tell that you're here by your vehicle. Without it, you've got nowhere to go and no way to get there quick. Rocket's eyes dart to the station door, the rat's current hiding place, but it's already shut fast, and bolting for it is only likely to get you killed faster.

No way out.

No, wait. Not quite.

No _easy_ way out.

But things in the desert aren't _easy_, so instead you stare at the gas pump through the window and then glance up at the shelves of the station that must have once been packed with foodstuffs, water bottles, little conveniences for vacationing families driving in perfectly air-conditioned cars to some abstract destination. Now, the place has mostly only got whatever was easy to scrounge for cheap and trade for carbons. 

Outside, the car pulls up. Two dracs pile out from the backseat, but it's the driver that catches your eye, and more specifically what the driver is wearing: heavy helmet, dark visor, and familiar, darkened leather. 

Scarecrow.

No telling if it's the same one that wasted Doublestar by shooting her in the right spot, positioning her in front of a set of BLi wheels. Maybe they all dress the same.

It doesn't really matter.

Hate has an electric taste behind your tongue, unfurling at the back of your teeth and burning the corners of your eyes. You twist at the circle of beads around your wrist, once, twice, remembering her expression when she passed them to you. _Those ones were your mom's._

There's a book of matches on one of the gas station shelves. Move for it.

"Jet," hisses Rocket, balancing on the balls of their feet. You wave them to get back down.

The door to the gas station bangs open half a second later. Hastily, you drop behind the line of shelves. If you're lucky, they didn't see you. If you're lucky, it's the dracs bumbling in first, and not the smarter, faster, and more discerning scarecrow.

You can tell by the sounds that it's dracs, uttering half-formed noises that almost approximate words, but not quite.

If it was just two dracs, it wouldn't be a problem. You can shoot through two dracs, drop them without a word. The problem is really in that there's a scarecrow just outside the door - watching the only exit, you realize as you crawl across the dirt-scuffed, cracking linoleum. It knows that someone's here.

You glance to Rocket, huddled near the door. They're tensed, wired up like a rabbit ready to bolt. Their eyes meet yours, ripe with a panicked and unspoken question: _what do we do?_

As carefully and distinctly as possible, you mouth to them silently: _get ready to run._

Rocket frowns at you, head to one side. _What?_

There's no time to clarify. The dracs are moving further into the station, and if the scarecrow follows them, if it changes its mind and decides to root you out for itself, you'll be easy targets.

The scarecrow starts moving. You catch its shadow, thrown through the glassless windows, as it walks idly past the swinging door and then around the back.

Looking for you. Checking to make sure you aren't hiding outside.

This is your only chance.

You move, crawling frantically toward the exit on hands and knees. Rocket's at your heels, for no other reason besides the fact that you obviously have a plan and they're going to stick close to you because of it. You point at the bike, a gesture mercifully clear in its brevity. Rocket nods. You busy yourself with unhitching the nozzle from the gas tank. Flip the lock on the nozzle, and lay it on the ground. Immediately, the strong-smelling liquid starts to darken the sand, leaching beneath the car's tires.

"What are you doing?" whispers Rocket, but there isn't time to answer. They're wheeling the motorbike carefully back when the hammer of footsteps from inside heralds that the dracs have kenned to something being amiss. Rocket ducks in time for a shower of light and laser fire to singe the tips of their dreads.

The scarecrow rounds the corner, gun out. There's no more time.

Strike a match, drop it on the steadily-widening puddle of gas, and _grab_ Rocket by the arm to tug them bodily away.

Don't look at the eruption so hot that it scorches your hair, bites at the back of your neck. You land heavily, flat on the sand. Rocket nearly falls on top of you, but manages to get their arms underneath themself in time to start running. Behind you, the flames seethe up, out, licking at the motorbike you didn't have time to drag away from the blast radius.

The only escape route is to run, so you run. You run and pray to the Witch, pray to Destroya, pray to whoever might be listening, that the fire is already swallowing up the scarecrow's car. If they have to chase you on foot, you might stand a chance.

You're a faster pair of legs than anyone else. You can run even under the sun's peak in the midday. In the desert, you've learned to run in spite of the heat, in spite of the sweat, in spite of the fact that every other part of you wants to shut down and die. 

Remember Coma's crooked grin as he shoves his sunglasses over your eyes. His laugh: _jet-setter._

You can run farther and faster than anyone. 

For half a minute, you forget: you're faster by far than Rocket.

Stop when you finally realize that they're not at your side. They're behind you - far behind you, little more than a spidery lump of shadow on its hands and knees. You're not close enough to hear the wheezing, the retching that you know must have doubled them over.

You stop running, reverse, and start sprinting _back._ You made them ditch the motorbike, so you have to get them out of this. You're the one with the steady shot, the unflinching resolve, the speed and deftness and ability to survive out here, so it's your job to keep them _safe_ and you've done that so far.

Rocket's up on their elbows, staring at you like they want to say something, but their throat is full of hoarse coughing and they can't quite manage it. One hand at their wrist, yanking them to their feet, with the other at the small of their back to keep them upright. You're smaller and younger than them but they hardly weigh anything. They're rake-thin beneath their clothes, beneath the neon green of their shirt that's always been a point of pride for them but right now feels like a target.

There's laser fire bolting at both of you, sizzling in the sand, kicking up scorch marks and tongues of smoke.

You clearly feel the impact when two shots find their mark in the small of Rocket's back. They don't say anything; they only spasm on the spot, clinging fiercely to the fabric of your jacket, and utter a short _"huh"_ sort of sound - like they've landed a bit too heavily on the ground.

Your heart's as jackknife in your throat. They're still gripping your jacket, so they're still alive when you keep dragging them along. There's more plasma fire arcing for you. Rocket's the bigger target. You have to get both of you out of here, but even with the dracs on foot, they're going to catch up to you. You're moving too slowly now. You have to keep moving, but it's getting hard. Rocket's getting heavy.

More fire. Duck your head, and duck too late. A shot catches you on the wrist, another just above your hip. You nearly drop Rocket, and they slide partway to the ground from the sudden shift in support, and in that moment you realize - their eyes are too still, and too empty.

The smoking, wet patch on their back has widened, but their fingers are slack and their head lolls limply on their neck, and you - you _don't know when it happened._ When the Witch came for their soul. When they stopped holding onto you. When they stopped helping you by limping along and when they merely became dead weight. Their body's still warm with the ghost of life. You can't tell. You can't tell. You can't _tell._

There's no time for anything - to turn out their pockets, to root for supplies, to grant them anything but the most desultory of farewells.

There's no time to sit in shock.

With your good hand, you hook two fingers around the circles of beads and hand-woven bracelets that Rocket had been so proud of, work them off of limp hands, and whisper goodbye.

Then you're off running.

Running's easy. It's the first thing you learned to do, so it doesn't matter if every breath burns, if your body's overworked chemistry starts to churn and tar your legs with lactic acid and your throat feels like it's blistering without water and the fresh laser-rashes on your wrist and your side are starting to scab and congeal. Running's easy even when it's not, because the desert sand slips under your feet and you risk sliding down each slope and landing heavily enough that you might not get up again, and each rising bluff feels like an insurmountable ascent when you have to start pumping your legs to move uphill.

You don't have anywhere to go but forward. You have nowhere to run to. Your only objective, now, is to run until you can't. _No_ \- run until you find a mailbox, to send Rocket's soul home. It's the very, very least that you can do for them now.

Running starts to hurt. Your muscles are seizing up. You're running in the middle of the day, skin burning and peeling even where it wasn't shot by Better Living rayguns, and your breaths are ragged. You could pass out here in the middle of the sand and someone could find you days later, practically mummified by the unrelenting desert sun. Dehydration. Heat exhaustion. Lying out flat on the ground, unable to so much as twitch a muscle of your own accord until the desert wrings you dry or BLi finds you. One of the four acceptable levels of dead, because at that point nothing short of an ice bath is going to get you moving agin.

Your run slows to a walk. It's an inevitability. Behind you...you were certain that BLi was just behind you, but now there's nothing but the shiver of heat waves.

You have no point of reference for where you are any longer, or how far you've gone. You have no water, no radio, no food, no supplies, and no crew. You have the clothes on your back, the beads on your wrist, the gun at your hip. You have a fast pair of legs, a steady pair of hands, neither of which were sufficient in saving the lives of anyone in your crew. _Your crew._ Were they ever _your_ crew? They were Doublestar's crew, until they weren't. It doesn't feel right to claim any sort of ownership or kinship with them when you couldn't save any of their lives. Right now, you can't even carry Rocket's soul somewhere safe.

A dark blot on the horizon. Something to move toward. It might be little more than a heatstroke-induced mirage, but it's the first deviation from the flat sameness that extends in every direction, so you move for it. Your throat is beyond parched. Your legs tremble beneath the weight of putting one foot in front of the other. You almost slip, almost lose your balance, almost end up sprawled on the ground, but you catch yourself with the palm of a hand in the sand. It burns your skin on contact, but you keep yourself upright.

Keep walking. Walk until you _can't._

The silhouette sharpens into a familiar, colorful shape. A mailbox. You blink hard, screw your eyes shut, _shake_ your head, and force your vision to readjust, but the box doesn't blur and fade.

It's real. It's real.

Reflexive tears would spring to your eyes if you weren't dehydrated beyond that point. All you really manage is a dry, muffled sound approximating a sob, as your feet slip-stumble closer to the mailbox's even curve. The multicolored splotches of bright color stand out stark and clean in the desert air, in spite of the box's weathered edges, and the places where flecks of paint have already been wicked away by the wind and sand.

The slot opens easily, even if the metal is beyond scorching. There's a swirled painting of a domino mask along the even plane, with a pair of eyes staring hollowly through. Along one of the sides, someone has written in broad, sun-yellow letters: _I FORGIVE U._ You have to swallow back the bile that threatens to come boiling out from your guts.

You hear two of Rocket's beaded bracelets slither down the metal chute, land with a rattle within.

Then you slide down the length of the mailbox and shut your eyes. Fetched up against it, the heat steadily baking you alive, you won't last long without water, but it doesn't matter anymore. The Witch will take Rocket somewhere safe. They'll be with everyone else, soon. Doublestar, her long, ragged hair and uneven smile - assuming she made it to the other side without the Witch to guide her. Coma Doze's easy grin and terrible aim. Nova Cane's laughter, her names for stars, her ruthless ability to simply keep going even when she should be caving to half a dozen bleeding injuries.

Nine-Volt Rocket, who you were too fast for. Who you never meant to leave behind, but in doing so, cost them everything.

Your head sags, chin dropping to your chest. The sweat sticks your clothes to your skin, your hair to your forehead. 

Your body starts to shut down.

You let it.

**\--**

**even when  
your light turns dark **

**\--**

Somewhere in the colorless, empty murk that hangs suspended behind your closed lids, you hear it: a loud and piercing _caark_, like that of an old crow. It sounds impossibly distant, barely a blip, until you hear it again, louder.

Then again, _louder._

Twitch. Every part of you feels unbearably heavy, but your eyes shutter open fractionally, and then the persistent cawing has words.

" - don't look like he's moving." There's someone's breath on the bridge of your nose, stirring your hair. 

It's too bright. Your eyes slip shut again.

"He wouldn't, if he's passed out." Further up. To the left. Someone standing nearby.

"Shit, how old is this kid? Fourteen? Thirteen?" A third voice, even further back.

The person right in front of you leans back, no longer so close that their breath tickles your face. "You think Gertie would take him? She takes kids."

"Let's make sure we're not gonna be bringing her a _corpse,_ first."

"Hey." Pressure on your shoulder. A hand against your cheek, slapping it lightly. _"Hey._ Come on, you're not cold yet. That means you're still breathing. Unless - " A word you don't know. A curse, maybe. " - Overload, gimme your water. Kid's dried out."

"I don't have any."

"Someone who _has_ water, give me water so I can make sure this kid doesn't _fry_ in the next thirty seconds, _jesus."_

In another second, someone's more or less pouring lukewarm water over your head. It's enough to stir you, vaguely. And then it's the best thing you've ever tasted, enough to rouse you, if only slightly, from your hunched position.

Three faces swim into sharper relief. The one crouched mere inches from you - tawny skin, vermillion hair, lip piercing, a missing front tooth - sits back with a loud, gusty breath.

"All right. All right. You're outta the duststorm." A hand clasps your shoulder. A fleeting, gap-toothed grin. "Look at that. We just up and saved you, huh?"

"Let's get him to Gertie's," says someone in the back. Skull-patterned bandana around the lower half of their face, close-cropped pale hair. "She can deal with him. I'm not dragging around a dehydrated fucking kid."

"You're _welcome,"_ says the red-haired crash queen, with relish.

Even if you weren't drained, even if you weren't pulling yourself slowly away from the edge of heat exhaustion, even if you had the wherewithal to muster an answer to a band of zonerunners who saw fit to scrape you off the ground, there's no force in this or any other world that could incite you to tell them that they shouldn't have bothered. They dug you out of the pit that you were ready to bury yourself in, because it didn't occur to them to do anything else. It was a charitable instinct. It was the kind thing to do. They had no way of knowing why you were there, and where you intended for your story to end.

You can't hate them for that.

You also can't answer any of their questions about your age. What's age to a motorbaby? You've spent every day of every year of your life in the desert, watching seasons gust by, fighting and bleeding and scavenging and shooting every step of the way, the same as anyone. Time isn't measured in years, not when you sleep in the day and in the night, operating in the mornings and evenings when the heat is slightly more bearable; it's measured in body counts and broken bones. But eventually, the group collectively decides that you definitely look younger than seventeen, and that makes you a kid by a technicality, so they take you to the orphanage.

You didn't even know that the Zones had an orphanage. It's a new development.

Gravel Gertie is an older woman with a long plait of dark hair running down her back, long enough to hang almost to her hips, and it's hard to tell if she's actually older than most people you meet or if the desert's aged her prematurely, the way it does everyone. She acts older, though. Like someone who's seen wars breeze by before, enough to know how to live through them. Her eyes are so dark they're almost black.

You hear her thank the crew that saved your life, through your haze of exhaustion. Her hand on your forehead. Someone carrying you to what can't exactly be called a warm bed, but is rather an arrangement of blankets on an ancient wooden floor. 

Your body only has the energy to sleep and wake in fitful bursts. Most of your dreams are beyond recollection. Some host wide, blank masks, and the low, rusted sound of something laughing. Remember wrenching awake. Remember stumbling out of the building, barely able to walk a straight line. Something taped down to your side. Your right hand bandaged, but it itches so you try to tear it off - can't coordinate your fingers to snag the edges of the dressing and peel it away. Make it outside, stumble through the doorway, and the freezing night air is like the world's most merciful slap to the face. Hadn't realized how the heat was simmering beneath your skin and plastering your hair to the nape of your neck until the desert's chill utterly encompasses you. Remember the scattered spray of stars overhead. Remember Doublestar, the exact arc of her hand as she pointed out a satellite to you, the first time she whispered that you could have _that_ one if you proved you knew how to calculate where it would land. Remember the swirls of nebulas and galaxies so, so, so infinitely far above your head, utterly impervious to the torment of the desert, unaware of and uncaring of BL/ind's cruelty. The stars don't care if you've killed someone. The stars don't care if your crew never made it this far, but you did. 

Someone finds you speaking aloud to no one in particular, and has to more or less drag you back inside.

You almost die that night, you later learn. You don't hear about it until you're finally coherent enough to be told that you were feverish and nigh-delirious when they brought you in, an infection on the open wounds to your wrist and side that you didn't care to cover, and so dehydrated that you weren't conscious for most of it.

The worst part, arguably, is that you can't remember the names of the zonerunners who saved your life. You remember colors. Pieces. Parts of faces. The sound of a laugh that, when you concentrate, you realize doesn't belong to any of them at all - it's Coma's laughter, Coma's laughter bleeding in through the hallways of a head with not enough room for all the memories. You remember the name Overload, and you remember the name specifically because Overload is the one you fish out of a bodybag to root for carbons half a year later.

You're not the only kid that a crew of zone rats had to drop off on Gertie's doorstep, bleeding out and half-dead. Gravel Gertie doesn't require that you give her your name or your history. Her only rule is that you earn your keep in whatever way you can, unless you're strong enough to set off on your own. Killjoys pass through here frequently, see. They can usually give you a ride to whichever Zone you need to get to, assuming they're heading that direction.

She has a hard smile that looks like it's been carved into the ridges of her terra-cotta-colored skin. She looks like someone who's lived out here her whole life.

For maybe a week, you're in her care, and then in the months after you learn how to stitch a bandage, since Doublestar always just used rags and pieces of clothing. How to disinfect a wound, because Doublestar only ever rinsed them out with water and called it good enough. How to tie a tourniquet with one hand and hold the knot there with your teeth, because sometimes the other is occupied with keeping a kid from squirming away from a needle. There's a wrongness in watching blood being drawn with clinical precision, nothing at all like the untidy spatters you've watched spraying the sands a dozen, hundred, thousand times over, but you learn how to do that too.

You're one of the oldest that Gertie has in her keeping, not like most of the kids that end up getting brought here sick with radiation and coughing up their lungs. There's a dedicated graveyard out back - for those who die without something to carry to the Witch's sights. Some are so young that they don't even have names. The zonerunners who bring them don't always have room for passengers, and they don't pass through often for you to have a guaranteed ride somewhere else, so mostly you end up having to sit and wait it out.

It's all right.

No one here needs to know your name, or your past. No one demands anything of you aside from that which you can provide - your spare set of steady hands, your spare set of sturdy legs. No one knows how many dead hearts and cold names stick to your shadow.

Rocket's strand of bad luck beads sit spooled on your wrist beside your mother's. It's a small weight to carry, but it's yours. It's the only balm against the ache of something you can't name as it sits heavily against your chest in the blackout chills of the Zone nights, when it's impossible to sleep and you stare at the star-flecked canvas laid out above your head.

It sharpens into prominence the day that a pair of killjoys come to roost for an afternoon, buzzing through the desert with a roofless car and a request for water. Gertie's not about to tell them no, when the one who does all the talking doesn't look much older than you. You watch their fellow dust rat, a one-armed 'joy with hair bigger than yours, follow her to the water spigot mounted on the side of the orphanage.

There's no mistaking the fact that they're killjoys. They dress like it, look like it, act like it.

The other killjoy climbs out of the driver's seat to sit astride the hood of the car, even though it must be burning to the touch. The whole thing is sheathed in a cast of silvery gray that may or may not be an intentional paint job, but is almost blinding in the morning light. You have to squint through the reflective haze that glimmers like starlight to pick out the pair of lanky, underfed legs that kick out into the sand underfoot. 

The killjoy smiles at you. That's the first thing to stand out: the white flash of a smile set against skin the color of fired clay. Their hair's long on one side and shaved short on the other, the same way Nova's was, only this crash queen's seen fit to weave the long drape of their hair into a tight braid bound with a band of red.

A long, pale strip of scar tissue slashes across the bridge of their nose and down the fine-boned slope of one cheekbone.

They have cheekbones so fine they could cut you.

You've been standing there and watching them, caught silently in one place, for a good thirty seconds now - sweat-stained, dust-soaked, hair tied back and out of your face with a blue bandana. 

"Don't remember seeing _you_ here before." The zone rat's voice is lower than you'd expect, for someone who doesn't look much older than you. Maybe not even eighteen. They lean forward on the car hood with a smile. They're missing a chunk of one ear off the top. Their clothes look about as beat up and frayed as you'd expect from someone who's made a life in the Zones - loose shirt, red pants, battered boots, and a jacket of torn-up, ragged leather. Something around their neck glitters, some sort of pendant or symbol, you'd guess, but the light's too sharp in your eyes for you to gauge what - and how are you supposed to focus on picking out the details when the killjoy is still _looking_ at you, open and curious and unblinking with eyes only a few shades paler than Gertie's?

Their smile is pearlescent.

You shrug, shade your eyes to look in Gertie's direction. She's showing the other 'joy how to pump the water. The fact that the orphanage has a working water pump makes it a frequent rest stop, in theory, but these are the first crash kids you've seen in months.

"Look a bit on the older side to be staying with Gravel Gertie." The killjoy is still talking to you. You look back to them, and you're positive that your expression betrays something of your uncertainty. They're looking at you, expectant, clearly anticipating an answer that isn't coming.

When you persist in not saying anything, the crash queen sighs.

"What, c'mon? _Como es que se llama esa mierda..._cat got your tongue?"

You shake your head, frown at them. There's no graceful way to say that the cadence of their words carries a pair of memories too achingly familiar to name. The killjoy slides off the hood of the car and crams their hands into their jacket pockets. The gun at their hip is a rich orange-red, almost the same color as Coma's. The sight of it alone doesn't quite lurch your heart in your chest, but you slide your gaze very deliberately away and keep watching Gertie in the corner of your eye, all while keeping the other killjoy in your periphery. You know better than to look away.

Even if the pair of them seem specifically designed to scrape old wounds raw.

Gertie has you help their fellow crew-member carry the cooler full of water back to the car, since the other only has the one arm to do it. 

The two of them chatter to each other as though you're not there.

_"Él es muy fresa, ¿verdad?"_

_"No seas gacho,"_ says the one with the braid, but their smile is crooked and snide-angled. _"Es timido."_

A scoff from the one-armed 'joy, as the pair of you lift the cooler into the trunk. _"Ni madre. No ha dicho nada."_

"Don't need to," you catch yourself saying, slamming the trunk shut. You don't inflect the words in any particular way, but they emerge louder than intended. It hadn't occurred to you that you could parse what they were saying until you've already answered.

Both killjoys stop, stare at you.

"Oh, shit!" The one with the braid recovers first - grins wide and starts to laugh. "Wasn't sure you even spoke _English, wey."_

Another shrug. That probably won't do for an answer, so you add, "when I need to."

It just isn't often that you _need_ to.

"So what _are_ you doing here?" The killjoy with the braided hair is certainly the talker. "I mean, I know sometimes Gertie picks up wayfarers, kids without crews, but you've gotta be, what, sixteen? How long's she gonna let you stay here?"

You don't really have an answer to what your age might be, but they don't seem interested in one.

"Look, _ese_, I'm just saying that you don't gotta stick around here if you don't wanna. Queen and I - " They glance over to the other killjoy, who's already climbed into the passenger seat without bothering to open the door, then rattle on, "we're not headed anywhere in particular, but I'm just sayin', we _could_ be."

The questions that nest behind your tongue aren't ones that make themselves easy to articulate. _Why me? What do you get out of it? Why are you asking?_ The dust runner in the passenger seat drums at the dashboard with sun-reddened fingertips and doesn't look at you.

"You headin' anywhere?" The question is neutral, with raised eyebrows and a tilt of the chin.

You shake your head, because that's the honest truth - you _aren't_ heading anywhere, and you _don't_ have anyplace to be. You don't think Gertie would protest if you chose to stay here with her, helping with whoever comes her way. She could use the extra hands, you're sure.

"We're not really a crew yet. 'S just two of us. But Queen, she was in the Analog Wars. Got her arm blown off by a pig bomb, see?" 

Analog Wars. Pig bomb. Was she there, then? Did she watch it happen, in Zone Seven? Did she see everyone wailing, screaming, bleeding, dying? Was she caught in the Fires? Something of your tension must show in your frame, because when you look to her, there's abruptly the weight of a hand on your shoulder, and the other 'joy is leaning in close.

"Dracs think they can grind us out now. Like we're the last of some dyin' breed. And I say they're dead wrong, _¿verdad?_ I say we can fuck 'em up just as bad as they fucked us. I say we can fight 'em just as hard as before. Maybe harder. Make 'em pay for everything they took."

They have no way of knowing that it was the War. They just assume there was something that you lost, at some point, that you heard about the Wars, the Fires, that you suffered the same as anyone else did when the news of that devastation hit. They're not wrong. It was always the Wars, wasn't it. The first time, it was Doublestar, stepping into the War's crosshairs. Then it was Nova and Coma, trying to fight back before things got too late. Then it was Rocket, shot through by dracs trying to clean up those that the initial blast didn't clear. The dregs.

Some people lost limbs, lives. Others lost everything else.

You frown, briefly, at the ground. Regard your steady hands and strong legs. Good for smoothing over other people's injuries, but just as good for surviving, the way Doublestar taught you. She didn't want you mounting up and going to war, to fight someone else's battles. But the Wars caught up to you just the same. Everyone in the Zones, regardless of who they are and why they chose to live in the dust, has to reap the consequences of them.

Doublestar, pulled under the tires.

Coma and Nova, incinerated in an instant - or murdered slowly, dying, hemorrhaging into the flame-stricken dusts of Zone Seven. 

Rocket, bleeding out so quickly you missed the moment when their soul slipped from one world to the next.

Your hands are fists at your sides. So Doublestar never wanted this for you, but you can either fight or you can run and the end result might be the same, but if all that matters is the stretch of road it takes to get there, you'd rather go out putting those steady hands and strong legs to good use.

Your hand comes to rest on the other 'joy's shoulder, and you meet their eyes.

They grin wide.

"Dust Devil." That's their free hand, tapping at the center of their chest. Then they jerk their thumb over their shoulder, to indicate the other killjoy camped in the car's passenger seat. "That's Fever Queen."

"Jet," you offer in exchange.

The Dust Devil angles their head to one side, very slightly.

"Just Jet?"

There's no one left to remember them but you - the shape of the stars in the sky, the places where the satellites crashed back to earth. The dark velvet of the clear nights when you could pick out the names of constellations with Nova. The feel of Coma's sunglasses on your face. The words of Destroya on Rocket's lips when they whispered them in quiet recitation.

And Doublestar, always Doublestar, with her lines of beads and her words like iron in the core of your bones.

The blanket of the dark bowl of the heavens, every night you traveled with them.

"Star," you say at last. "Jet Star."

Dust Devil claps you once on the back and clambers into the diver's seat.

"Well, Jet Star," they say. Their smile is a brilliant white beneath the heat of the sun. "You coming, or aren't you?"

You get in the car.

**\--**

**and you burn out  
look up**

**\--**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And so begin the origins of Jet Star, at least as I interpret him. I have a rough timeline of the other two chapters blocked out already, but I can't say I know when they'll be completed. I was set back rather significantly due to numerous power outages and evacuation procedures that affected my living situation (fun!), and between work and this year's NaNoWriMo, I might not get around to really knuckling down on the other two chapters until December. However, I do intend to see this work to completion - I'm simply too excited about it to let it, or this universe, die. I already have several other tie-in works underway, but I plan to finish this one before publishing any others.
> 
> A few endnotes: 
> 
> First: Apologies to any fluent speakers of Spanish and Japanese. I did my best with both languages as they came up, but I was never much good at the former (I might be the worst Mexican you'll ever encounter), and have done almost no work with the latter. It was important that both languages feature in this fic, given the canon setting's Japanese influence - and for the love of god, if it's set in California, you can't tell me that no one speaks Spanish. But sadly, this means that these languages will have to feature a good deal more in the future, and be subject to my linguistic butchering. If anyone out there can correct my awful attempts to replicate Mexican and Japanese slang, please feel free.
> 
> Second: I was quite anxious to introduce original characters that would feature so prominently. OCs have cropped up in this universe before out of necessity, given the sparseness of the setting, but not nearly so regularly as they do here. I hope you will forgive their inclusion, as well as the fact that you will need to suffer through an entire other set of them before Jet reaches the Fabulous Four. I intend for this to very much be Jet's story, regardless of the company around him; if at any point the focus of the fic suffers because of any density of the surrounding cast, I apologize. I had to make some visual aids for my own reference, so on the off-chance that anyone is interested: [Doublestar](https://i.imgur.com/N2C28iA.png), [Nine-Volt Rocket](https://i.imgur.com/e2WwDtO.png) (pre-injury), and [the twins, Nova Cane and Coma Doze](https://i.imgur.com/1MArFjT.png).
> 
> Third: As is typical for me, this fic is peppered with numerous references. The poem between line breaks can be found [here](https://sprsoldier-archive.tumblr.com/post/119545429693/look-up-see-the-stars-up-in-the-weathered-skies); it is not my own composition. The title of this fic and a handful of lines sprinkled throughout can be sourced to paraphrased quotes from one of my favorite lyricists of all time, the often-fatalistic and always distinctive Pete Wentz. The first chapter's title is a bastardization of the infamous quote from J.M. Barrie's _Peter Pan_. All names and characters are my own design, with the exception of the bit character "DJ Plastic Beat," whose name is a shoutout to the 2010 Gorillaz album Plastic Beach (which, imo, is fabulously on-the-spot in theming with this universe, particularly as it relates to Better Living), as well as the bit character "Overload," whose name comes from the song "Stylo" off of said album.
> 
> Happy Halloween, and happy MCR reunion day. I wasn't going to post this today, but given the news...it seemed fitting.


	2. the plastic-eaten wasteland and the gasoline refugee

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As we move into the second part of this Jet-centric triptych, a few more content warnings seem relevant to the release of this chapter.
> 
> First of all, you may assume that many of the warnings listed at the beginning of this work will remain in full effect.
> 
> Additionally, this chapter deals, in part, with implied government experimentation and implied surgical/medical horror. No medical procedures are carried out in real time, but surgical scarring is a plot point and is referenced at length in one section. A number of teenaged characters briefly explore their sexuality, but it doesn't go very far in any particular direction. One character experiences some severe gender dysphoria and engages in some brief self-harming behavior as a form of maladaptive coping. This chapter contains a number of slightly graphic character deaths, largely for named (original) side characters. At some points, certain characters express some suicidal ideation.
> 
> This can be an intense one in places, guys. Tread carefully.

\--

****

**\--**

**on the rooftops  
swallowed by the city and the smoke**

**\--**

The stars are going out.

They're not actually going _out,_ of course. With the time it takes for light that far away to travel to your retinas, some of the stars you're looking at, you're sure, are already dead, have already expired, have already exploded outward into so much cosmic dust or shrunken into something dense and imperceptible.

The stars are _fading._ More specifically, they're fading from _view._ Because after the Analog Wars are finished and the dust has settled, the smoke still won't clear. Instead, the thickening smog mantles in increasingly heavier layers around the atmosphere and obscures the stars that you used to stare at when you couldn't sleep.

The Wars are over, and they take the stars with them. They blanket the sky in smoke until you're pretty sure the only thing that still shines through, on occasion, are the satellites that BLi tosses up into the heavens, but you don't calculate those trajectories anymore. One by one, the stars get harder to pick out in the thick, dark smoke that curtains away the desert sky. You're losing the constellations that you and Nova had invented names for simply because you could. Some nights, it's easier to single them out of the hazy dark. Most nights, it isn't. The further in you go, the harder it is to study them in earnest. Out in the furthest reaches of the Zones, the sky is clearest, and you can almost get a completely unobstructed view of the sky the way you remember it. You're certain that you could get the best view from Zone Seven, if Zone Seven was still a thing that existed.

You hazard the possibility that Better Living is doing this intentionally, drowning out the heavens with their own excess. It doesn't seem like them, though. More likely it's simply a consequence of what they are, and what they do - the unending and ever-escalating consumption of things that boil off into the air and thin away the atmosphere and choke the gases from the sky. The loss of the silvery pinpricks in the dark basin of the sky is little more than a byproduct of you living in their world.

And it _is_ their world. Maybe it always has been. The Wars didn't rebalance that, or even take that away from them. They're still Better Living. They still own the breath in your lungs, even if you've never set foot in their stifling, monochrome city, and they remind you of that with each rush of fumes that further darken the sky and poison the air.

The stars get harder to see.

Your world gets a little smaller.

****

**\--**

**we dangle our legs and split  
a glass bottle of something brown that burns in my throat**

**\--**

The pressure of foot to gas pedal. The grip of hands over a wheel. The reflective glare off the silver paint of the car that you share with two other people who decided that you looked like you were worth taking a gamble over. The shapes of their names are still unfamiliar against your tongue, in the folds of your mind, and you're certain that they're regretting their choice when you have to admit to them that you only vaguely know how to drive a car. You only did it the once, when you were younger, smaller, with far shorter legs. You don't share that the car ended up a smashed wreck by the end of your stint behind the wheel, largely because your driving is irrelevant to the structural damage it amassed. Most cars that go roaring through firefights probably don't survive very long.

Dust Devil sighs, but guarantees that you'll know how to drive by the end of the week.

In the first week, you learn how to steer rubber tires over hot desert sand when they clearly weren't built for anything of the sort. How to slam a car into a hairpin turn through sheer force of momentum. How to change a tire. How to patch a tire. How to make an almost empty fuel gauge work for you until you can get to a gas station.

What you also learn is this:

The Dust Devil has knuckles with calluses that have been torn open into a spatter of pale scar tissue along those dark, red-brown ridges, and they've got the same subtle tremor in their hands that everyone from the City does. They're not like you; they still have their fingerprints and their skin isn't stained with shrapnel scars and old burns. They have long legs and pinkish palms. Their boots are too big for their feet, their pants slightly too baggy, and their jacket is a beat-up, torn-to-hell rag of darkened leather that they nonetheless wear proudly. The front of their shirt has a caricature splash of an airbrushed skull along the front that you suspect they did themself. They have fine, sharp bone structure, dark eyes, a catching smile, and a terminal lack of any sense for other people's personal space. You learn this when they fall asleep against your shoulder while you're driving, and when they take to sprawling inelegantly onto your lap apropos of nothing whenever you're sitting down. When they speak, you think of fire, of orange dust and searing heat.

They've got a bullet on a string that they wear around their neck. When it catches the light, it glimmers like a fragment of star that's been ripped from the sky and stuck to their skin. It stands out because you don't think you've ever seen a bullet in your life, and when they catch you staring, they hook one thumb around the twine to dangle the bullet away from their chest and their infectious smile dims by degrees.

"Had family in the Helium Wars," says Dust Devil. "This bullet should'a killed _mi padre,_ but it didn't."

That's all they say about that.

You learn that Dust Devil likes being called "he" and likes being called "they" and some days is more adamant about people using one than the other, but doesn't seem to care when you or Queen switch mid-sentence. Most of the time, he seems to like it.

The Dust Devil has a decidedly casual disposition, prone to unprompted displays of physical contact. A hand on the small of your back. A head leaned against your shoulder. Fingers fiddling with fraying strands of your hair. Their familiarity is even more pronounced with Queen, whom he kisses unreservedly several times without warning just prior to climbing into the driver's seat, and then resuming the day as if this was something perfectly ordinary.

She takes it in stride, with a blink and a roll of her shoulders that indicates this isn't anything out of the usual, which makes it easier for you to do the same.

Fever Queen is quieter, less prone to smiling, and is generally the more reliable of the two of them. She's not as good a shot as you, but she can throw a punch like no one you've ever met. She's black, with thick, curly hair that puffs resolutely outward. Her clothes are battered and she wears them with less care than Devil; her layered shirts are mostly yellow and green shreds in places. She has a slightly crooked nose, like it was bashed in and then healed wrong, and is missing her left arm from the elbow down. She can drive one-handed, shoot one-handed, and ties knots with her remaining hand and her teeth. She shows you how she stitches most things one-handed but never talks about the incident that took off a limb, even if she operates with a fluidity that suggests it was long enough ago that she's learned to adjust. On certain days she takes to tying a differently-colored scarf to the part of her upper arm that's still there. You learn the meaning of those colors quickly - not because she points it out, but because the Devil makes a point of referring to her in different ways depending on the shade of color bound around her skinny bicep. 

You don't waste time wondering how long they've been traveling together. It's a question that slots onto your tongue but dies underneath it, unspoken, the way most things do. It isn't a question with any purpose and it isn't a question that will help any of you survive, so it doesn't need to be said. It's clear that they know each other well enough for it not to matter. 

"You're gonna need a mask, _mi compadre,"_ says Dust Devil one night, clapping your shoulder with one hand. The contact is still sudden and unexpected and it makes you jump slightly but you don't flinch away. When you give him a puzzled look, they smirk, and slip something out from underneath the folds of his jacket. It's a cheap thing, made of reddish, rubbery material, with narrowed eyes and pointed horns.

"Everyone needs one," says Queen, from the other side of the communal fire the three of you built after stopping for the night. You have to squint through the haze of smoke to catch the color of the ribbon around the Queen's arm tonight - lime green, so - ze draws zir own mask out of zir pocket and holds it up for your inspection. It's yellow and green, made of some sort of synthetic, metallic compound. It catches just enough of the firelight on its rounded edges to light up the silver weal worn into the dull finish, like someone scraped something through its paint-job, or, more likely, tried to cut at the Queen's face with zir mask still over it.

"So they don't recognize you," the Devil adds. They drop the mask so it lies in the sand next to him as they sprawl out on the ground, folds his arms behind their head. "Can't figure out who you were."

It takes you a few moments to fully grasp what it is he means by that, and - oh.

They think you're from the City.

It's not an unfounded assumption to make. Most people out here had to have come from _somewhere,_ had to have fled the constrictive white walls of Battery City to form a better life for themselves in the desert. Most people weren't born in the sands with the wind in their hair and the heat in their skin. Most people aren't you.

It's also not an assumption you've ever had to challenge before. How are you meant to do this - to navigate the texture of your past so that others can conceptualize it? You've never had to outline your history for anyone who wasn't already there for most of it. It's not a skill you've ever had to develop, not a story you've ever had to tell.

Nodding is easiest, so you nod rather than protest or attempt to explain.

You're going to need a mask.

The Dust Devil slides his mask on, so that it obscures most of their facial features - but not the long plait running down one shoulder, or the pale scar that splits the bridge of his nose. 

"Gotta have a mask," says the Devil. "You're not a killjoy until you have a mask."

That's another thing to get used to - that Dust Devil calls you all _killjoys,_ like the word means what it used to. 

_Killjoys._ It's a word for _soldier,_ a word for _revolutionary._ A word for whoever was willing to risk everything to bleed out in a trench in an effort to topple BL/ind. Now it doesn't even refer to whoever's left of that failed uprising. Now it just means clusters of roving rebels, which already existed prior to the Wars but are now the only way that most killjoys can continue to fly under the radar.

Better Living crushes groups that get too big, now. Makes it harder to mobilize. Now they send out scarecrows and draculoids to comb the sands in droves. They devise new and exciting methods of killing that are low on effort and lower on manpower. They jettison canisters of thick, soupy green smoke into the sands that wipe out zonerunners by the dozens overnight. It takes something like a week for the Zone-rats to term the poison gas "limeade," and something like two for them to start developing effective countermeasures - stripping tubing and hoses from busted bikes and melting rubber into something they can use, scrapping fast travel in exchange for survival. Making trades. Rigging up breathing bags to help them live another day. Pretty soon, it's an unspoken rule that you can't last long in the desert without a rebreather.

Fever Queen finds a motorcycle helmet that ze pays a couple of for-hire tech-brains to repurpose into something with a built-in filter. For weeks, it's the only rebreather you have between the three of you, but you make it work. In the midst of a tumult of acid storms and smoke raids, you have to.

"We're gonna make 'em pay," Dust Devil keeps saying, saying it low like a mantra, muttering it at the horizon with a dark scowl in the direction of the City - or rather, where you know the City sits in its cradle of glittering white. "We're gonna make 'em pay for all of it."

Fever Queen never seems to have anything to say to that, so you keep your mouth shut because Dust Devil seems to be saying it for their own benefit. He never elaborates on what they mean by _make them pay_, unless by that he means that every time you duck BLi's eyes or shoot down a drac scouring the sands for stray zonerunners, you're getting back at them.

It's not. What Dust Devil means, what they _really_ mean, is going up against the culling parties that Better Living sends out into the Zones to stamp out the remaining traces of resistance. They couldn't fully eradicate them after the Fires, even if they dealt those forces an irreparable loss.

You suppose that, by nature, killjoys make themselves hard to destroy.

****

**\--**

**you ask me if i love the stars and i say  
maybe, once**

**\--**

It's an ambitious goal of the Dust Devil's. Too bad it's impossible. Better Living wants to exterminate every one of your kind, and it's doing a pretty good job of it. Raids are more common than they were, now that there's not a War to occupy all their most dedicated killers. More often than not, you run into the aftermath of a clap gone wrong. Dead 'joys dressed in bodybags are a grim sight, but they make for the richest pickings, assuming someone else hasn't gone through their belongings already.

It's never bothered you, combing through the pockets of the dead like a vulture. You do what you have to do to survive in the Zones. That's just how it is, and how it's always been - for you, the same as anyone else.

Fever Queen finds a dead radio from a bodybag out left in the middle of Zone Four. Tosses it to Dust Devil, who considers it with a critical eye.

"Might be fixable," is his final verdict, before carrying it to the car.

You dig a long strip of cloth from the pocket of another corpse clad in one of Better Living's crinkling, carbon-plastic composite bodybags, shake out the dirt, shove it into your pocket. You don't have a mask, but neither does the body you're currently looting. This will have to suffice. Their clothes have been there long enough to have stuck to the skin in places, so there's not much else you can take from the long-dead killjoy lying nestled in their final resting place, other than a stray handful of carbons in the pockets of their jeans.

Something about the angle of their features, the shade of their hair, strikes you as vaguely familiar, so you dig out the bit of fabric you just took off their corpse and study it.

It's patterned with skulls.

You glance back up at their face. Their hair is a platinum gold color, probably bleached. With their skin ashen from decay and their body already decomposing, it's impossible to tell, but there's a memory digging its claws into your head that sounds like a voice and when the voice speaks it says: _"Let's get him to Gertie's. She can deal with him. I'm not dragging around a dehydrated fucking kid."_

You open your eyes and then there's a name to go with it, spoken by someone else, someone whose face is little more than a blur in your mind - _"Overload, gimme your water. Kid's dried out."_

You can't know. You can't know for _certain_ that it's the same person, not when your recollection of that time is so hazy to begin with. But staring at them now, there's a solemn recognition resting heavy as a stone in your gut.

Dust Devil stops just behind you. You can feel their eyes on the back of your neck.

"...someone you know?"

You realize that you haven't moved in several minutes. You've just sat there, crouched over this desiccated shape in its bodybag, clutching a bandana, apparently lost in thought.

You force yourself to stand, and turn away.

"No," you say, because that's the only answer that would actually be true.

"Oh, shit." The Dust Devil's eyes zero in on the fabric in your hands. _"That's_ pretty milkshake. Trade you for mine," he says, pinching at the polka-dotted scrap tied around their neck.

You accept the trade, because the megawatt grin that lights up his face is worth it, and because you have enough ghosts stalking your footsteps without adding more unearned grief to your shadow.

You still kiss the beads on your wrist when you drive off from the bodies you leave behind.

You think you owe them that much, for saving your life.

****

**\--**

**we were born children of a gilded age  
gods with mortal hearts and paper skin**

**\--**

The Dust Devil is keen on acquiring a radio that works. They tell you so when you stop to hunt for water outside a crop of old, caved-in buildings. Dust Devil can ramble for a solid twenty minutes about the way life was, the way things used to be - not because _he_ saw any of it, they'll be quick to tell you, but because he knew people who _did._ Canyons of skyscrapers, dug into the landscape. Glittering lines of cars stuck end-to-end like beetles, so many of them driving the same direction that they made traffic jams in the city streets. People full of noise and color and _life._ Sounds like a dream, don't it?

It sounds like it must have been, until Better Living claimed it in an inexorable sweep, a great invisible hand closing tightly over the country, the _world,_ and crushing it all into a fine powder poured into pills to emotionally deaden the masses.

"Let's just focus on finding _water,"_ says Fever Queen, arid and impatient, drawing even with you and thus allowing you a sideways glance at the ribbon on the Queen's arm - blue, today. She's not wasting time looking at either one of you.

Most of the buildings are little more than skeletons of themselves, walls held up on sticks and bits of detritus battered by acid wind. Whatever this place used to be, it isn't useful for much - not even for shelter, which is why it's primarily deserted.

There's a storm boiling on the horizon, a swirling maelstrom of dust thick enough to block out the sinking sun.

You find the Dust Devil at the edge of the crop of buildings. They don't seem very preoccupied in searching for water, for a well, for a spigot, for anything. His eyes are distant.

"We're gonna make an army," whispers Dust Devil, when you move to stand beside them. He's fingering the bullet on its twine hanging from their neck, staring out at what looks like a solid wall of reddish dust frothing out across the landscape of Zone Three. _"Un gran ejercito._ We're gonna build an army and _fuck_ them for what they did to us. Ghost every single one of those white-latex _capullos."_

That doesn't seem very constructive, and also pretty far from the realm of _possible,_ but, again, that's not why you're here. You have four ghosts hanging over your head and two circles of beads on your wrist and you're the only person left to sing their tunes into the air-waves, so maybe it's a sort of vengeance that itches at you, aches in the marrow of your bones. 

You're willing to consider it.

You're willing to consider that it might be vengeance that motivates you. It might be _spite,_ the determination to drag oneself through the dirt and spit out blood and come out on the other side, despite the world's numerous attempts to stamp you out like a spark in the dust. In spite of draculoids, in spite of waveheads, in spite of pig bombs and catastrophic weather shifts and the sickening white smear of Better Living across everyone and everything.

You can shut your eyes, and you can still picture each one of them, frozen in the last moments you saw them. Doublestar disappearing beneath the treads of massive tires. Coma and Nova, trailed by exhaust, dark against the darker sky. Rocket, eyes open and turning the dust red beneath them. You can shut your eyes, and you can _see_ the graveyard that Gertie kept behind the orphanage, for the kids who died too young to have names, for the dead Zone-rats no one gave a fuck about, for the dead killjoys who didn't have someone to carry their possessions to the Witch. You dug some of those graves. You dug some of them because no one else was fit enough or healthy enough to manage it, and it didn't matter if you didn't know the name or the face of who the grave was for; every time, it felt as though you were bleeding out some of the poison in your veins, and every time, you sat back and breathed out your exhaustion and felt slightly better for it.

"Fuck it." Fever Queen has to cup her hands to shout over the sound of the mounting storm in the distance. "There's no time. Let's motor!"

Dust Devil whips around and climbs into the car, turns the keys in the ignition.

"Jet!" calls the Queen from the backseat, not looking up from the dead radio she's been fiddling with ever since she found it. She's been, thus far, unsuccessful in getting it to do much of anything. "You coming or not?"

You pull your bandana up over the lower half of your face to blot out the worst of the dust and wind, and you climb into the car after them.

****

**\--**

**you stroke my fevered cheeks and i  
croon hymnals into the creases  
of your bonfire blackened palms**

**\--**

Talk of building an army turns out to be more than just talk. Dust Devil wants it bad enough to try and make it a reality. It doesn't matter if the Queen doesn't seem to think it's an option. Neither of them have asked your judgment on the matter. They seem to be happy to have settled in their characterization of you as the quiet, impersonal pair of hands that does what you're told. You don't bother saying anything to contradict the notion.

It's easier than the alternative.

The point is that the three of you scoop up a crash queen trekking along on foot. The Devil makes you stop when they realize that the zonerunner's got a radio that _works_.

"Stop, stop," says Devil, leaning out from the backseat to bash at the front seat door with the flat of one palm, and point. "Over there! They gotta radio, see?"

They've got a radio, and they're traveling on foot. It's not difficult to get a read on them just by looking at them: shaved head, flat nose, wide mouth, ripped-up brown jacket laid over a shirt striped in green and yellow. Jeans torn open at the knees to reveal scraped-up bony knobs patched red and tan, boots so worn that gaps yawn between the soles and the heels. They also look like they're wandering solo. Most rubberburners who wander alone don't last long. They're too convenient as targets - for draculoids and for other zonerunners alike.

There's no unity in the Zones anymore, but you don't remember very much about the time when there reportedly was. You were on the fringes of that life. It was never really yours.

"Hey, sunshine," says the Dust Devil, with that wide smile of theirs. Dialing up the charm by about nine hundred percent. You coast the car to an uneven stop, momentum carrying the chassis over the sands for a bit longer than it should. "You going anywhere fun?"

The dust angel coughs in a way that seems more pathological than circumstantial, and you've learned how to tell the difference because Rocket might be gone but you still remember the sounds they made, and never stopped making until the day they just out and out _stopped_ for good. 

The Zone-rat spits red into the sand, wipes their mouth with the back of one hand. Their fingers are flat and wide, sheathed in dark cloth that's frayed at the knuckles into something fingerless.

"It's earthshine, actually." When the word is met with blank stares, the Zone-rat sighs, long-suffering, like it's had to be explained a dozen times before. You've never heard the word, and you can tell that the same could be said for Queen and Devil, who only look at each other.

The zonerunner jabs two fingers at their chest.

"Y'know. Call me 'she'? And depends. You driving?" You're close enough to get a better look at her, and her grin is ragged. There's blood in her teeth, in her gums, even if she doesn't look like she's physically injured in any demonstrable way, and her radio is spewing what sounds like a nonstop flurry of indistinct chatter muted by static. She's short, shorter than anyone else in the car, but there's a width and stockiness to her lower body that makes her seem more imposing than her height would normally allow.

"Jet's driving, technically." The Devil indicates you with a jerk of his thumb in your direction. "Seriously. Headed anywhere?"

It occurs to you that you might not have been the first person to be given the pitch that Dust Devil gave you, the day you met. It occurs to you only _now,_ when you're watching this exchange transpire in front of you, that nothing about you was particularly noteworthy, that nothing about you encouraged them to reach out by the virtue of some quality, some character you possessed. It occurs to you that you just happened to be convenient. It occurs to you that you just had the general shape and look of someone who could be recruited to a cause like his. How many others have they attempted to initiate to his revolution? How many others have received the same treatment before you?

Maybe not as many as you're envisioning. When you first met, it was just the two of them.

That doesn't mean that there was never anyone else.

"Headed anywhere there's water," says the crash queen, head to one side. "Sound shiny to you?"

"Sounds shiny to me," says Dust Devil with a grin. "C'mon. We got room in the backseat." And they scoot over to let the zonerunner climb into the backseat beside him. Her boots are caked in an orangeish dust that showers the upholstery as she clambers in.

You shoot a look at Fever Queen, inquisitive and sidelong. The Queen's ribbon is red today. He shakes his head at you once, lips pressed tightly together.

You look back out into the desert and gun the engine so it shoots from idling to spitting sand out from behind its tires.

"Dust Devil." The Devil introduces the rest of you from the backseat. "Up in the front is Fever Queen, and our driver here is Jet Star."

"Haywire," says the newly acquired motor-rat. There's a breathy quality to the words; they're pinched in something like a wheeze. This is also a quality you recognize from when you ran with someone with bad lungs. "Thanks for the ride."

"Hey, we pick up anybody who might wanna give some _cerdos_ a taste of their own meds," says Dust Devil. "That sound like something you might be interested in?"

Haywire's grin is the type that has a _sound_ to it. Even with your back to her, even driving and with her sitting directly behind you, you can _hear_ the quality of it, like something rough-edged and sharpened to a point. Her voice has a jagged quality to it, like vivid yellow splinters of light breaking apart at the seams.

"Oh, that sounds like that might be a thing I'd be interested in," says Haywire, the words low and liquid and dangerous. "You could say _that."_

The radio is still fizzing like a malfunctioning smoke bomb. The Queen twists around, and in the corner of your eye you can tell that he's issuing the thing a scowl. The noise must be bothering him, but you've sat around a poorly-tuned radio too many times to be glitched off about it.

You keep your eyes ahead of you. You keep your focus on the road that isn't really a road so much as it is a vague direction Dust Devil gave you so that you could reach an _actual_ road and maybe start driving at a speed a little higher than twenty-five.

"Can you shut that thing off?" snaps Fever Queen.

"I can do you one better," says Haywire, breezily. "I can get us a channel."

The Queen turns back around with a sigh. "Do _that,_ then."

With a click of twisting dials, the radio snaps from indistinct sound to something _loud,_ the heavy crash of guitars intercut with screaming vocals. The abruptness of it pours molten orange and violet into your skull in a falling cascade of electric-bright bursts. The words being belted into the mic are indistinct, but something about the synchronization of the language with the sound of cymbals, the kick-drum thud of a bassline, wraps a fist around the strings of your heart and pulls tight and does not let go.

There's no graceful way to ask what this is or why it makes your blood sing the way it does, so you settle for asking ungracefully.

"What _is_ this?" you murmur, the first words you've spoken in something like a week.

Dust Devil laughs. The angle of the way they're sat means that you can just see him in the corner of your eye, hair streaming in the wind and head thrown back in obvious mirth.

"What? You never heard of Mad Gear, _wey?"_ The words are just south of mocking and surprised and amused all at once, a skepticism redolent of a buried insult.

How to explain this to them? No, you've never heard of Mad Gear. No, you've never had the occasion to learn the names of songs or bands or attend shows hosted by groups you've never heard of. You're aware, have _been_ aware, of the existence of these things in an oblique, peripheral way, much in the same vein that you're aware of the concept of the ocean, or of other pieces of a world splintered into an irradiated wasteland and ruled in fragments by a megacorporation whose assets the Dust Devil now wants to unmake from the bottom up. You're aware that these things all exist, that they are parts of the universe you inhabit, but you've never witnessed them personally. You're aware of them only in the abstract. You were too busy fighting and bleeding and watching your friends die to preoccupy yourself with things that had no bearing on your immediate and sustained survival.

The first things you learned were how to survive, and you've done that. There wasn't room in that hardscrabble forward motion for anything else.

That being said, you have the proverbial road to focus on and getting offended over someone else's presumption of your ignorance isn't worth the time and energy that would be required. You shake your head.

"What kinda Zone-rat's never heard of the Mad Gear and Missile Kid?" Haywire leans forward, so you can catch her reflection in the sideview mirror. Her teeth are pinkish with blood against the sand-colored tint of her face. Something about the tapering shape of her eyes and the tilt of her eyebrows strikes you as vaguely familiar, though you can't say why. Her features, in combination, feel like they might be reflective of other faces you've seen. 

The note of contempt in her voice is too overt to ignore. Thirty seconds into meeting you, and she sounds scornful of your own dearth of knowledge in an area with which you've never had any means of acquainting yourself, or any genuine incentive to.

It's bait. You're a little too busy driving a car to concern yourself with bait. 

She slumps back in her seat. She and Dust Devil are laughing, already resonating with an easy camaraderie that feels inexplicable to you, who's known Dust Devil for longer and yet has never managed to connect with that effortless audacity. You note in an almost clinical fashion the bleeding edge of doubt that germinates in the back of your mind when you dwell on that, the spike of envy that jabs itself deep into your guts. You trace it back to its roots; find that it's not directed at Haywire, but at the Devil.

It's not hard for them.

It's not hard for the Dust Devil to open up and say things that emerge sounding meaningful and profound. It's not hard for him to be likable and disarming and it's not hard for them to assume a bright familiarity with people that he's only just met. They keep you at an arm's distance, you suppose, because it's easiest. Because you keep yourself at that distance from others by instinct. It's easiest because you have a set role, and Dust Devil doesn't anticipate or seem to particularly _want_ you to perform in any way that might fall outside that role. You shoot well, you learn to drive, you don't talk back, and you don't ask questions. You were perfectly willing to play soldier in the grander scheme that Devil seems so intent on facilitating. Being needed, being _required_ in some way - that's a path you understand full well how to tread. You follow orders because Dust Devil gives orders like he expects them to be followed, the same way Doublestar did. Only Doublestar didn't really give _orders._ She didn't give orders the way the Devil does. She stated the things she needed you to do like they were facts, foundations of the universe, cornerstones to your continued survival.

You can see the Queen sat back, looking out across the desert as it rolls by. He doesn't engage in the casual back-and-forth taking place in the backseat. He also follows orders, generally. He lets Dust Devil lead. He hasn't expressed any desire to alter that chain of command.

The thunderous peals of Mad Gear are still blaring out of the backseat, almost loud enough to drown out the peaks and troughs of the emergent conversation at your back. Almost, but not quite. It's easier to focus on the buzz of music in the back. It unspools interesting patterns behind your eyes, and while you drive, you let it slip underneath your skin and into your bloodstream. It makes your heart beat fast, like the blister of adrenaline without the accompanying thrust of danger. It ignites firecracker bursts of color in your head, myriad forms and intermingling swirls of it. It's not like anything you've really, actively _listened_ to before. It reminds you of the music you once heard blasting from the back of Skull's truck, but that feels like it was longer ago than it really was. Time passes differently in the desert. It passes differently when every day is spent just trying to survive.

You tune out Haywire and Devil's conversation. Instead, you concentrate on the music, and you drive.

Mad Gear.

The Mad Gear and Missile Kid.

You start drumming at the ridge of the wheel with your fingers, matching it to the beat of your heart - to the thud of a static-sharp bass drum.

The marriage of sound and color is a welcome break from the chatter in the back. You don't have to listen to the words if the music drowns them out.

Music makes an acceptable substitute.

****

**\--**

**we lie awake and try and find  
the words to paint the ache  
that blooms beneath our skin**

**\--**

Haywire is an uneven addition to the tentative dynamic that you'd only vaguely established prior to her recruitment to Dust Devil's crew. She's not a bad addition, logistically speaking. She's all right with a raygun but she's not very consistent, mainly because she tends to sacrifice accuracy for speed and quantity. Some of it's by necessity, because her hands shake worse than anyone's you've seen, when she's not wracked with coughs and dry heaving in the middle of a firefight. Half the time, she doesn't even remember to tie her mask around her eyes, though it's little more than a simple strip of black cloth with holes cut out of it. She instead prefers to spend her time hailing her foes with as much plasma and laser fire as possible until you can taste the raw charge in the air. She saturates everything she does with what she is, and she happens to be someone who practically invites destruction with every word and every act. There's an unapologetic nature to her casual nastiness that rides at odds with you and Fever Queen.

Devil, contrarily, only seems to welcome it. They laugh loud and long to Haywire's jokes. He commends her brutality when she breaks a drac's arms before shooting it dead for no apparent reason aside from the fact that she wanted to see it scream before planting a laser between its eyes. Her ruthlessness seems to bring out something answering in them. Devil was always unswerving in his confidence, but now...

It's some weeks after Haywire joins the entourage when Dust Devil progresses from the odd arm around your shoulder or hand on your head to outright kissing you.

They do it more or less without any warning, apropos of nothing, in the post-meal quiet that always hovers around the fire prior to everyone bunking down for the night. The conversation is idle, and it's mostly carried out between the Devil and Haywire, who now compare the grips to their rayguns, you think. You're not really paying attention. You're listening to the muted chatter on Haywire's radio while trying to gauge if it's chitin or a claw stuck between your molars, because tonight most of your food consisted of wild insects, and you were the only one who wasn't bothered by the idea of eating a scorpion.

" - doesn't matter," Dust Devil says, and suddenly he's got an arm around your shoulders, leaning into you, cheek to cheek. "If I _really_ need someone taken down, Jet can shoot better than anybody."

And then they've got lips on yours for half a second, kissing hard, smelling of smoke and ash and sweat and then pulling back in the next moment, before you can do anything about it. By now you've seen him do it before, so it's not as much of a shock as it could be. Just yesterday, they'd grabbed Fever Queen by the front of zir jacket and yanked zir forward for a few minutes. He's even planted one on Haywire's cheek here and again, but this is the first time they've done it to _you_ and you're not entirely sure how you're supposed to feel about it. 

Dust Devil grins, leans forward with his hands on their knees, and resumes talking like there wasn't just a break in the conversation.

You're left sat there, trying to dissect what that meant and _why_ there's a _warmth_ curling out in the core of you, unfurling like a pair of wings, and a heat in your cheeks.

Is it the smell of him that stirs you - or just the _attention?_

You can feel Queen's eyes on you. Haywire hasn't even acknowledged it, the fact that Devil's diverted the conversation for a purpose you can't entirely grasp. Or, perhaps, simply don't _want_ to.

The sensation sticks with you when you drift into uneasy sleep the same night. It's still clinging to your skin when you rise the next morning. The radio's blaring static and sound in the front seat when Devil tells Haywire that she can drive, when the two of them laugh and rib one another in the front like they've known each other all their lives. 

You can't exactly fault them for that. A killjoy's life is short. If you don't wring every ounce of enjoyment from it, you risk death and, worse, anonymity in death, which is the lowest kind of death for a killjoy to have. Lives in the Zones are short. Legacies aren't. Those are the kinds of lives allotted to zonerunners: those spoken in hushed words over campfires and written into the sands themselves. Anything beyond that is wishful thinking.

You're trying to get the taste of Dust Devil out of your head, but it's not working. Again, Queen's eyes are on you - like ze can tell that you're still dwelling on the previous night, when everyone else seems to have forgotten.

When you stop for gas, Devil has you refill the tank. Your knowledge of cars is erratic at best, piecemeal and faulty and based largely off of what you can remember from when you still had a teacher. You still, evidently, know more about cars than any of the rest of them, which is why they have you fill the tank and make sure that everything's running the way it should. Something about the way you check the numbers and lights within the vehicle must reassure the Devil that you're doing everything correctly, because you only have a vague idea of what it is you're supposed to be doing.

You lean back against the car's sun-warmed, silvery paint as the tank gradually fills up. Then, unexpectedly, a hand settles on your arm. By now you're usually accustomed to unanticipated contact but for obvious reasons you're a little on edge right now so the contact nearly makes you flinch. You steel yourself when you whip around so that your inattention hopefully comes across as mere jumpiness and not nascent panic.

Part of you expected it to be Devil, but it's not. The Queen's looking at you, zir eyes dark and questioning.

"They do that sometimes," ze whispers. "Stuff like that, I mean."

You don't have to ask what ze means. You've gathered as much from the way that Devil more or less sprawls over the people in his crew, leaning up against them without warning, dropping their head on top of yours and long arms falling down over your shoulders - tensing you up, making you restless that he might reach up and slide arms around your chest and feel things that they shouldn't. 

You're not sure what the Queen expects you to say to that, so you simply nod uncertainly.

"It's...you can tell him to stop. They like to see what he can get away with, so..."

_Have you?_ you don't ask, though the words dance on your tongue briefly. _Have you ever told them to stop?_

Did he listen?

You feel like you might already know the answer to that one.

Devil does it again a week or so later, this time cupping the line of your jaw to brush lips to your cheek. This doesn't take you off guard as much as it should; just yesterday they spent the duration of "dinner" (which is to say, the period of time between deciding to stop driving for the night and actually falling asleep, which only occasionally involves the actual consumption of food) reclining with his head in your lap and their feet kicked up onto Queen's knees as easily as if it were some sort of standard, nighttime routine. He's bold, and only getting bolder when you don't issue any sort of protest. They grab your elbow, hook an arm around your shoulders, slide arms around you from behind to prop his head on your shoulder and grin lazily up at you. It's an impressive feat, considering that you're taller than them - rather significantly. You're getting to the point where you're taller than most people.

Queen doesn't pull you aside to demand if you're okay with it a second time, though sometimes she looks at you with a frown and a question in her eyes. She's the only one who really seems to notice. Haywire barely pays Devil's languorous _familiarity_ with her and everyone else any mind; she's yet to so much as verbally acknowledge it.

The contact doesn't bother you. The contact is fleeting and ephemeral and still more frequent than what you're used to. It's the frequency that unbalances you. Not _unsettles_ you. Just...catches you unaware.

This isn't why he wanted you to join them, is it?

It wouldn't be.

It isn't.

Is it?

No.

It doesn't make any sense. The longer you watch - no, you're certain that it _isn't,_ because Devil is unreserved and openly affectionate to _everyone_, including you. It's just that its newness arrests you, and there doesn't _seem_ to be an expectation of reciprocation. That doesn't mean there isn't one.

Devil has a notion of the role you fill for the group, you think. You _think,_ because you can't _know,_ but it's in the way he asks you to do certain things, the way they parse out different roles for different people. Fever Queen is always the person Devil asks to keep eyes on the horizon when he needs a sentry. Haywire is the first that Devil turns to when they need someone to be _loud_ and highly distracting, drawing draculoid fire.

As for you, you shoot sharper than anyone. You run fast, you pick up things quickly. You know enough about cars to get by. That's what Devil turns to you for. And that's fine. You can serve that purpose. You don't need to be anything other than what you are.

Does he expect you to?

As usual, there's no precise or polite way to ask.

Eventually, you decide that you shouldn't waste your time on thinking about it any more than you already have. There are still nights when there's an indefinable _want_ for it clenched like a fist over your heart, but that's all right. You're not about to let it distract you.

You learn to leave the wanting behind when you get up again in the mornings. You can dwell on those thoughts on your own time.

You just know that Devil has a use for you. It doesn't particularly matter what that use is.

****

**\--**

**(sleep does not come easy to the damned)**

**\--**

Eventually, you all come to the collective conclusion that the you can't expect to last very long with just one rebreather between the four of you. Not when smoke-raids are getting more common, and more and more zonehoppers are choking on toxic gas whenever BL/ind drops some fresh limeade canisters right on top of their heads. You'll need to barter for some or steal some, but with all the cadavers there've been to loot lately, you are, as a collective, alarmingly wealthy by zonerunner standards.

"I think we got enough to shop at Tommy Chow Mein's place," says Haywire, counting up carbons in the backseat.

Fever Queen wrinkles zir nose. "Who?"

"Tommy. Y'know, the new guy who's set up a bunch of places in all the different Zones." Haywire looks between the three of you. When she doesn't pick up recognition in anyone's eyes, she scoffs. "Seriously? How out of the loop _are_ you all?"

"We look like regular shoppers to you?" snaps Dust Devil. They're driving today, eyes set on the horizon, but it's gratifying to hear that you're not the only one rankled, on occasion, by Haywire's presumptive nature. "You think we're gonna feed into any of that BL/ind consumerist shit?"

_"Tommy_ probably has rebreathers," says Haywire, nonplussed. "He probably has tons of 'em. And then we wouldn't all need to _share."_

Dust Devil is silent.

Haywire yawns. She stretches, her arms arching up high above her head. The motion hikes up her shirt, revealing the fractalized red of radiation burns that sprawl out across her midriff in irregular splotches.

For several moments, Dust Devil continues to drive in silence.

Dust Devil thumps the torus of the wheel with his palm. Then, in a low, grudging tone of defeat, they mumble, "where's Tommy's nearest place?"

Haywire grins.

Tommy Chow Mein reportedly has establishments that have started cropping up all over the Zones. He's a new face - or at least, a face that's not become a common name until semi-recently. Some rumors insist that he's got insiders who feed him intel and equipment from within the City walls, people on his dime who bend the rules for his sake. There's no way of confirming it; his stock turns out to be equal parts pirated BL/ind gear and stuff that looks like it was picked out of bodybags.

Dust Devil stops you all by the place he's got in Zone Four around evening. The lights are on, and there's a neon _OPEN_ sign that looks like it was broken off an old establishment, because its letters all flicker crookedly in the half-light.

A couple of Zone-rats perusing some of the shelves look up at the four of you as you enter. A little fucking bell chimes as the paneled door swings open, the frame cheap and probably some kind of composite of plastic and god knows what else.

The interior is a dense, floor-to-ceiling assemblage of color and oddly-shaped objects that jut out in a completely disorganized sweep. There are several lines of clothes that hang from mismatched hangers on one side of the room. Shelves that look like they might have once belonged to a gas station or an old convenience store have been heaped high with masks, with pieces of scrap, with paraphernalia you don't recognize and can't put any names to. A wide-eyed figure of an indistinct species, crowned with round ears and tufted-out cheeks of matted blue fur, stares at you with a bland and unblinking cheerfulness. You quickly look away.

At the very back of the place is a desk with a battered cash register and a cardboard box that looks to be full of mismatched sets of keys and behind it is a man with greased-back hair so uniformly dark that it has to be dyed. It's paired with a pinstriped suit that has the bizarre effect of making him look both exactly like a discerning businessman in perfect line with BLi's ideals, while simultaneously like someone too off-kilter to be lumped in with their colorless ideology. He has a gold hoop through one ear. His eyes are dark and fast and he takes in the four of you like he's inventorying you.

He doesn't call out to any of you. He just watches you as you gradually disperse and start to move through the junk-packed aisles. Haywire said that he probably had rebreathers, but it's hard to pin down any distinct sense of structure in the haphazard piles of _stuff_ that liberally litter the walls and shelves.

The bell jingles again. The Zone-rats are slipping back outside of the building, darting infrequent looks over their shoulders at the four of you. You watch them go.

"There's no price tags on this shit," mutters Fever Queen. Ze picks up a domino mask of glittering red and flips it over, as though searching for some sort of identifying mark. If you didn't already have a priority, you might consider buying some of the many, many masks lining the shelves - masks that must have come from dead killjoys. You might consider buying them just to feed them to the nearest mailbox, because the thought of them languishing here, untouched, on some anonymous businessman's shelves instead of bearing their owners' souls to the Witch's domain...it turns something in you.

No one's going to make you buy them. Not even Fever Queen or Dust Devil, who insisted you get a mask. You've been making do with your bandana, tied across the lower half of your face. It's not as though the City has any files they can match up to you.

"Rebreathers," says Dust Devil, in a warning tone to the rest of you. "We're here for rebreathers. Nothing else."

You all nod, though your eyes are wandering, your focus already drifting. You end up staring at a shelf laden with pieces of old droids. Disembodied, metallic hands and chunks of thigh plating lie piled beside one another, haloed by a frizz of silvery wires. Years ago, it might have been you pawning this stuff off to Tommy Chow Mein. It _would_ have been, maybe, eventually. You never handled transactions. You never watched how the deals shook down. One of those many, many other things that Doublestar simply never got around to teaching you - that she didn't have the time to cover.

At the edge of the shelves packed with pieces of old service units and pornodroids is a colorful square of something that looks like it might have words printed across the surface of it. Drawing closer reveals that it isn't just a formless block. It's a book.

Not a book, exactly. It's cheaply made, sheaves of what appear to be bits of old magazine and abnormally thick paper compressed between squares of plastic and bound with wire. Absently, you flip it open and look down at the uneven script on the pages and you're looking at a verse in sprawling all-caps and it reads: _AT THE END, THROUGH THE FIRE AND THROUGH BRIMSTONE, A SAVIOR WILL RISE FROM THE EARTH. HE WILL WALK THROUGH HELL'S FURY AND BRING AN END TO THE NIGHT. SUNLIGHT WILL SEE THIS CITY ONCE AGAIN AND WE WILL WALK OUT INTO THE WORLD. WE WILL BE FREE. HIS NAME IS DESTROYA. AND HE WILL TURN BATTERY CITY TO ASHES._

It looks handwritten.

You've heard these words before. You've heard them spoken between Rocket's parched lips, you've heard them whispered in nights when they didn't think anyone else was awake, you've heard them - you _remember_ them most of all, most _clearly_, from the night you watched Doublestar go under the tires of a BLi truck and Rocket prayed and you all cried.

You flip through the pages of the thing with a fervency that doesn't fully settle in until you realize you're soaking in the words hungrily, staring at pencil drawings of tiny stick-figures kneeling at the base of something massive and far-reaching, a colossal, metallic shape stretching into the heavens. They're familiar words, words you've only ever heard spoken aloud. They're written in scratchy pen across torn chunks of filthy card-stock. They're daubed in paint on the backs of ads for Plus battery replenishers and pornodroid service manuals. There, on a crumpled aluminum wrapper: _WHEN THE ELECTRICITY STOPS WE WILL BE SAVED._ There, written over a page torn from a magazine: _Let it be known that we will see destruction before we see life, just as we see it in the proliferation of pills and the poison of electricity. The City will create its own dissolution._ On a scrap of paper stapled down: _WE HAVE SEEN HIM AND WE KNOW HE IS COMING._ Written over some sort of requisitions form: _DESTROYA has heard our fatidic songs and knows our suffering._ And there, on piece of smoothed-out napkin: _What lies behind City lines? We will know when DESTROYA comes and we will see his child raze the City walls - _

"Got an interest in religious texts, do you?"

Tommy Chow Mein has managed to end up just behind you without you noticing. You lurch on the spot, hand automatically leaping for the raygun at your hip.

Not many people can sneak up on you, these days.

In your own fairness, you were distracted. You were lost in the haze of your own memory, in the thought of someone speaking the words you've heard dozens of times before but never seen written down.

Tommy Chow Mein looks smaller when standing face-to-face with you, and not seated behind a counter. The top of his head barely makes it to your chin; it's possible that the entire reason he sits behind the counter at all is so that he can maintain the illusion of height. Something about the way he carries himself still makes him feel larger than he is. He's the authority here, even if he's in a suit and tie and not visibly _armed_ in any particular way - but you have every confidence that he has _some_ manner of security that you can't see. He'd never last this long in the Zones if he didn't. He'd be robbed every night.

Tommy's head goes to one side very slightly. He smiles, and the expression doesn't go any further than his mouth. His eyes are oil-slick and just as dark. He inclines his head faintly at the object in your hands without looking away from you.

"That can be all yours for thirty carbons," he says.

You snap the book shut and set it back down on the shelf where you found it. _Thirty_ seems an excess, but if Chow Mein is the only consistent supplier in the Zones, he can probably get away with setting whatever sorts of prices he wants. You wait for him to smile thinly at you and brush past before going your own way. You know better than to turn your back on a stranger.

Fever Queen has a box of something in zir hand, fingering it anxiously. Ze catches your eye and then quickly looks away as ze slides it back onto the shelf, guiltily.

You're all picking at things that you shouldn't.

Rebreathers. You're here for rebreathers.

"Tommyyy," says Haywire, leaning on the counter to peer around in search of him with a sort of determined familiarity. She thumbs at a trickle of blood running from her nose. There's a little silvery bell perched beside the register, which looks like it probably doesn't actually work very well at all. Haywire _dings_ it several times over with her fingertips. "Hey. Tommy. Tommy. Tommy."

You're here for rebreathers, but there's a line of jackets strung up on hangers and you can't help but stare a little bit. You've never seen clothing and supplies in such abundance all kept in one place. You've only ever cribbed clothing from dead bodies, from BLi bodybags, from rotting corpses hanging out of car windows and crushed beneath caved-in buildings. Everything you wear now was either taken off someone dead, or was traded from some other Zone-rat who probably took it off someone dead, and it's all more or less in equal states of ragged, stained, torn, and discolored. The clothes hanging in Chow Mein's establishment have their fair degrees of wear and dust, but they look cleaner, crisper, more colorful, than anything you've ripped from the dead.

There's a dark jacket hanging on the end, but it's not the creased leather that arrests you. It's the tricolored symbol printed on the back. You don't reach for it, don't pull it off the hanger, don't make the same mistake again, but it draws your eye regardless. You can tell at a look that it's slightly too big for you, but you've always liked things that are too big for you - things that hang loose, that can be easily layered. It makes it easier to hide the parts of you that you'd rather others not see.

_"That's_ gotta be a relic," mutters Dust Devil. He draws even with you, picks the jacket off its hanger and holds it up. "Look at that. That's a bona fide American flag, right there. Someone must've smuggled this out right under BL/ind's nose."

You don't know that word. _American._ You look to them quizzically.

"They hate anything that reminds people that they weren't always in control. That there were other powers, once," says Devil. "God, how long's it been since anyone's...?" Devil flips the jacket over, then starts running fingers along the edges of it, picking at the lining and the pockets, like it might reveal who once owned it. The symbol sprawls across most of the back. White and red stripes running vertical and downward, but it's the stars that hold your attention, five-pointed white on blue.

"Tommy!" says Haywire, loud enough for you to hear her even from the clothes racks.

"What?" snaps Tommy.

"Rebreathers," says Haywire, brightly, with no preamble whatsoever.

_"What?"_ says Tommy.

_"Rebreathers,"_ says Haywire again, drawing out the word. Then, with the exact same amount of unsuited and inadvisable false cheer, "do you have them, motherfucker?"

"Out," says Tommy, pointing at the door with zero hesitation.

Dust Devil shoves the jacket at you in a distracted, offhand fashion, attention swiveling to the altercation at the front.

"What? C'mon, Tommy, it was just a _question,"_ says Haywire, clearly trying for both playful and disarming.

_"Out,"_ says Tommy. He jabs his finger at the door with even more emphasis.

"What's up?" says Dust Devil, inserting themself into the orbit of the conversation with a wide, white smile and a deliberately casual air.

"I remember you," says Tommy Chow Mein. He seems to be ignoring the Devil for the time being, instead addressing Haywire. "I _banned_ you from my establishment."

"You banned me from your establishment in Zone Five," says Haywire airily. "This is Zone _Four."_

Tommy grunts. "Then you can be banned from this establishment too."

_"Hey."_ Dust Devil steps between the two of them, his tone hardening. "Is there a problem here?"

Tommy Chow Mein smooths his hands over the patterned fabric of his suit, which looks too clean and too uncreased to have survived in the Zones. He doesn't look up at either of the killjoys at the counter. From the back, you can see that Dust Devil's hand has dropped to hover just over the gun at their hip.

"No _problem,"_ says Tommy, but the words are icy. "Is this an associate of yours?"

"You could say that."

Tommy snorts, and it's a strangely delicate sound. "Then you can get out as well."

You don't have to see Dust Devil's face to know that his expression is hardening. The line of their jaw has clenched, his throat tightening. Their hand closes over the handle of his gun. Fever Queen - ze's not in your line of sight, so you don't know where ze's ended up, but if things start going Costa Rica, you know ze'll be there to back up the Dust Devil because that's what ze _does._ Haywire is still smiling. Tommy Chow Mein's face is locked into an expression of absolute stubbornness, and there might not be any security here that you can _see_ but that doesn't mean that there isn't any at _all_ which means that if Dust Devil escalates this it might not go over well.

The jacket is in your hands and the stars are poor imitations of the real thing but you haven't found any rebreathers so you stride to the front, chin up, eyes forward, and deposit the jacket on the counter and your words are perfectly steady.

"How much?" you say.

It's a risk, but given what you know of Tommy Chow Mein, what you've gathered in the twenty minutes you've spent in his place, you doubt that he's going to pass up a sale opportunity.

He pauses.

"You're buying?"

You nod. Dust Devil is at your back. Haywire is looking at you but you don't meet her eyes so you can't get a read on her expression.

"Hundred c's," says Tommy.

_"A hundred?"_ the Dust Devil hisses, plainly outraged.

You're taking another risk. You _know_ you are, but you don't _have_ a hundred carbons so it'll have to be worth it.

"Sixty," you say. You know exactly how many carbons you've got in your pockets, on hand, because you've tallied them up as you've taken them off dead bodies and dug them out of pockets, and you know how most deals are supposed to work because that, _that_ is one of those things that Doublestar _did_ have time to teach you before they dusted her. How to keep track of numbers. How to make sure no one's giving you a bad deal.

Start low. Lowball it, and then climb higher. It's a common business tactic. The key is to meet in the middle. There's an art to it, allegedly, but it's probably an art that requires a lot of talking and you're not very good at that.

"Sixty is _theft,"_ snaps Tommy Chow Mein. "I won't go lower than ninety-five."

He's playing it hard. You can still feel Haywire's eyes on you.

With difficulty, you smile.

"Seventy."

"Eighty," says Tommy.

"Seventy-five."

Tommy hesitates, then - 

"Done."

The three of you exit Tommy Chow Mein's store minus seventy-five carbons, plus a shiny new jacket, devoid of both new rebreathers and any sizzling new raygun burns.

"That was some quick thinking, _mi colega,"_ says Dust Devil, but the compliment sounds grudging. "That _hijo de puta_ wasn't worth it, though."

"Tommy's always like that," says Haywire, dismissive. "You just gotta give him a hard time."

You're not entirely certain she's right about that. You look back over your shoulder. Dust Devil sees you do it.

"Crap," they mutter. "Fever Queen. Where's - ?"

"Right here." Ze sits up from where ze's apparently been lying in the backseat of the car. "You guys took long enough. No rebreathers, huh?"

Dust Devil grunts, and climbs into the driver's seat.

"I think I found a place to spend the night," says the Queen, scooting over so you can join zir in the back. "Buildings around here are mostly intact, and I don't think anyone's claimed 'em yet."

"'Long as no one smoke-bombs us, I guess we're milkshake," says Haywire from the front.

Fever Queen sighs. "Don't jinx it, Haywire."

The Devil starts the car. You can tell by the lurch of the engine, the way the wheels wrench a little too severely in the dust as you pull out from your parking spot, that a part of him is still chafing from the exchange in Chow Mein's.

"Nice jacket," mutters the Queen beside you. 

You catch your reflection in the side mirror, your smile crooked.

It might have been an impulse forged out of necessity, required for the act of deescalating a nascent altercation, but part of it wasn't anything of the sort.

You like the idea of wearing something BL/ind hates on your back. You're already a target to them, just by living out here. You might as well earn it.

The night finds you bunking down in an unfamiliar building with two stories and it looks like it might have once had more, but what's left of the third story and up has now been reduced to tumbled rubble at the structure's base. There's an uneven jag of cement that still juts into the sky, a part of a pillar that must have supported a third level of what Dust Devil calls a _parking garage._ The idea of there being enough working cars to require an entire structure just to house them all is as alien to you as the concept of carrying a gun that only shoots bullets.

Sleep doesn't come easily. It never does. Instead of tossing restively on the spot, losing warmth in a slow and inexorable bleed to the relentless heat sink of cold cement at your back, you climb to the dubiously steady "roof" of the building.

It's easier to breathe underneath the exposed sky, even if you know you're breathing in just as much of BLi's stink and toxicity as you are actual air. It still feels crisper up here. Sharper. Cleaner.

"He's lying, you know."

Your shoulders jerk, heart thumping fast for the half a minute it takes for you to locate the source of the voice. And then, not too far up above your head - Fever Queen, sat up on the pillar of cement that jabs sharply upwards into the night. The coal-red smolder of a lit cigarette burns between Queen's fingertips. It's too dark and too distant for you to get much clearer of a picture, so you sigh and take the moment to scale the ragged concrete tower until you're sat beside Queen. The Queen's got a blue ribbon now, visible even in the murky semidarkness.

It's no mystery how she got up here. The way the building has fallen apart due to age and time and probable infrequent bombings, there's enough heaped debris to climb it easily.

She doesn't look at you to read your frown, but she doesn't have to. She yanks at the collar of her shirt with two fingers.

"About the bullet," she says, dully. When she speaks, her words are a mellow jade-green. "About the Wars. Everything. You think they knew anybody in those Wars? Dust Devil dug a couple of those shinies out of some old memorial. Sold 'em all to pay for the car, 'cept he kept one 'cause they think it makes him look badass." Fever Queen snorts, low and scornful, and sucks a long drag from her nic-stick. You didn't know she was a smokehead. Maybe it's an occasional thing. Might be she lit up her coffin nail in a moment of respite, or celebration, because none of you got shot today and for a minute back at Chow Mein's, it was looking like a sure thing. She must have bought them when the rest of you weren't paying attention. The expression of guilt you remember flashing across her face makes more sense, now, because you were supposed to be walking out of there with rebreathers and instead she spent her c's on cigarettes, the polar opposite of what you went in for.

But then, you spent all your carbons on a jacket, so maybe that's why she feels secure enough to smoke right in front of you. It's not your prerogative to ask. Most things aren't.

There's the still the question of why she's telling this to _you._ Maybe because she knows you won't tell anyone else. Maybe because Haywire is still new and she doesn't really have any kind of read on her yet and she has no one else to vent to. Or maybe it's merely circumstantial. You were closest, and she needed someone to tell. That someone might as well be you.

You could get up and walk away, if you wanted. But she wouldn't have said something, wouldn't have gotten your attention, unless she had a reason for it, so you don't. You don't have anywhere you need to be tonight, and Fever Queen's actually taking the time to make an effort on your behalf. Out of everyone, she's the most straightforward.

"Such bullshit," mutters the Queen. She exhales a long plume of smoke that gusts gray against the midnight-dark of the night sky. Out here, the stars are barely visible, glimmering faintly through the sheen of smog that always blankets the skies these days. 

You don't say anything. You don't think she expects you to. No one ever does.

"You're not the first sunshine we've picked up, you know," says Queen, confirming your earlier suspicions that you've never voiced aloud, all with one easy phrase that doesn't stem from any topic you can ever remember discussing aloud. It's not clear to you where this line of thought came from or why she's saying it now. "You're just the first one who's _lasted_ this long. Devil's got this idea that we can fight back. Like _hell."_

The Queen reaches up and scratches at the stump of her arm - the place where it simply ends at the elbow. 

"Devil wasn't there. Didn't see what it's like when you get smoked out and when you see people get _blown up_ right the hell in front of you."

The question's ripe and tangible on your tongue: _was she there?_ Was she there in Zone Seven, the day the Fires began? Did she witness what happened, see it transpire in person? Did she hear the DJ's warning, get out in time to live, minus an arm? Did she see them - two satellite chasers who should never have been there, sharing a motorbike, riding unadvised into a War that wasn't theirs to fight?

There's no easy way to ask.

Devil said she fought in the War. She's done nothing to either challenge this or to confirm it. She can fight with brutal efficiency in spite of her missing arm, like how you'd expect someone who was in a War to fight, but you don't know. You've never actually met someone who you know for _certain_ was actually _in_ the War.

Looking at her now, though, you believe it.

The Queen doesn't wait for you to weigh in, and, again, doesn't seem to expect you to. As you might've guessed, she really just wants someone to listen. 

"Thinks they can wander in and act like a hero. It's _such_ bullshit." Another drag.

You look to her, sidelong, and you feel the frown crimping your brow. None of them really know how to _read_ you with a look, but sometimes the things you leave unspoken are obvious enough to make their way through regardless. And the longer she talks, the more it raises a question that you know has always _been_ there, hovering in the back of your head, unasked, but it's not until now that it's made its way to the forefront.

"Why do you stay with him?" 

Fever Queen startles slightly, giving you a look that suggests she wasn't expecting you to respond verbally. She recovers quickly, though. And then she smiles, a wry coiling to one side of her mouth.

"Why do _you?"_

You suppose you should have expected that. You look down in the absence of any easily defined answer.

"Yeah," says the Queen after a long moment. _"Me pasa igual,_ I hear you. Running solo never turns out well."

She hasn't answered your question. _Why do you stay with them?_ Did she decide that Dust Devil was worth it, in spite of the misgivings she's voicing to you now? Did she decide that the company, in general, was worth it? Was it little more than not wanting to be an easy target?

You, though, you weren't supposed to last as long as you did. You didn't have a plan after Rocket. You never really had a plan at all. You've never been the one to make the plans. No plan in theory survives coming into contact with the plan in practice. Skull-'n-Bone taught you that.

The Queen's smile flickers, fades, reforms into something with a sharper edge. Her expression, highlighted by the lit end of her cigarette, looks almost pained.

"Maybe it doesn't matter," she whispers, "if you believe in fighting another War. We're still stuck out here, and BL/ind's still killing us for it. Living out here...they consider it an act of revolution."

She sips smoke from her cigarette between lips pressed together. Breathes out a long, silvery trail that stands out, briefly, against the dark bowl of the sky.

"When I die," says Fever Queen, because to her it is a certainty and not a vague and distant thing, "I don't want it to be alone. I want it to be with people who give a damn."

You suppose you can understand that.

Some part of you wishes that you didn't.

****

**\--**

**when the sun goes down  
we light candles and wait in vain  
for the sky to steal our voices**

**\--**

100% Titanium is a giant of a zonerunner with long, dark hair that falls in an uneven cascade over most of their face, and Mantarraya is a small, wiry detonator with a face half-eaten by scar tissue and a pair of goggles too big for her head. They make themselves known to you when Raya blows up an old depot full of dracs taking shelter from an acid storm and the sheer scope of the concussive impact craters part of the road you're driving on. You barely manage to swerve out of the way in time to keep a chunk of rubble from caving in the hood of the car. A roofless car already makes for poor protection in a fit of acid rain. The three of you and most of your belongings are already soaked, and you know breathing in too much of this stuff isn't going to have great effects on your overall health, not that any of you expect to live long enough for it to matter.

This is to say, driving through acid rain is hard enough without parts of the road fragmenting underneath the tires.

"Jesus!" Dust Devil scrambles to stand up in the front seat, even though you're still driving. _"¿Qué mierda es eso?"_

The source of the disturbance turns out to be two shapes, one large and one small, running at a breakneck pace from a seething white mass at their backs. Laser fire shoots over the desert and through the curtains of pounding raindrops in a flurry of colorless bolts. It's clear from their apparel that they're zonerunners, same as the rest of you.

"Get down!" says Fever Queen, at the exact same moment that Haywire scrambles _out_ of the car and starts running _toward_ the steadily approaching bleach-white wave instead.

"Haywire - _Haywire, what the fuck?"_ The Devil is shrill in their disbelief. Haywire keeps running, and the next moment she's shooting. Her gun sparks streaks of amber-colored light down at the draculoid throng.

You hear the Queen swearing under his breath, but he's already climbing out of the backseat to follow her. Devil vocally disapproves of this.

"Queen! _Queen,_ what the hell! _¿Estás loco?"_

"She's one of us," snaps Queen. "That means we have her _back,_ Devil!"

And then he's running after her.

You hit the brakes. Devil nearly topples onto the hood of the car, and has to grab at the windshield and quickly sit down to keep from spilling onto the road. He glares at you.

"Running off too?" The words are probably meant to emerge a challenge, but sound closer to a sneer.

They're not looking for an answer when he already knows what it's going to be, and you're not about to offer one. You simply pull out your gun and kick the car door open.

The next moment, Dust Devil is only a few steps behind you.

"Christ, what's she _doing?"_ Devil seems to be rethinking their decision to recruit Haywire to the cause, staring at her with unveiled shock. Haywire disregards the assistance entirely. Haywire, you've learned, has a limited capacity to give a fuck about anything that isn't immediately furthering her personal goals, and those goals seem to be centered wholly around dealing out as much pain to as many dracs in as short a window as possible.

You won't pretend that you don't know why that is.

She's carrying the same chip on her shoulder that Rocket did, that you suspect many children of the carburetor carry after the effects of BLi's chemical excess began to be felt in full. Holes burned through the atmosphere, torching away the veneer of protection against the constant UV bombardment from the ball of radiation hanging suspended in the sky above everyone's heads. Haywire has Nine-Volt Rocket's frustrations with those biological consequences, only hers are ratcheted up to a thousand and one degrees. Instead of pushing herself to her limits, she simply forgoes limits entirely. She ceases to give a damn. Your theory is that she expects she'll go out eventually, and would rather go out in the ecstasy of violence than be subject to the slow and protracted death of each of her organs shutting down, one by one.

If Dust Devil has picked up on any of this, he doesn't show it.

Clouds of blackish smoke seethe out from the building that looks like it's in an active state of decay, supports crashing into one another as the ceiling caves in. It's clear that it's not going to stay very intact for much longer, though it's harder to pick out very many specifics through the pounding rain. The odd headlight slices a white-gold track through the storm. Some of them must have motorcycles. They would; it doesn't make sense to force this many dracs to travel on foot.

There are indistinct shouts and gruff noises echoing from the slope of the incline that extends from the crumbling depot to your current position. You can't get a read on how many dracs there are in the chaos, but it's more, far more, than you've ever seen in one place.

The zonerunners just ahead, the ones fleeing from the mass, are distinct because of their color and their shape and the fact that they're running.

The bigger of the two, the one with dark hair streaming out behind them, the one that looks like a solid wall of meat and fat and muscle, waves with one hand in a clear gesture for the rest of you to get back. You glimpse their slender eyes going wide, white around dark irises. Then the smaller Zone-rat beside them - you hadn't realized it, but they're holding something. They're holding something that's sizzling and spitting sparks into the sky, and then they wind back and hurls it at the feet of the dracs catching up to the pair of them.

It explodes with enough force to send several of them flying back down the incline. The ones that were closest, the ones that were truly unlucky, spatter the ground instead. They turn the wet sand into burgundy mud stained with scraps of white.

The good news is that, after that, the dracs probably aren't going to be able to rally to hit back at any of you with any kind of force or organization.

The bad news is that the smoke is still pouring into the sky, and it's drifting up your way, and the rain is still sluicing mercilessly down, and the four of you still don't have more than one rebreather between you.

The smaller zonerunner finally seems to realize that the two of them have backup. This doesn't seem to elevate their mood.

"Go away! Go _away!"_ they yell, loud and frantic. "Find a car and _get out of here!"_

"Sounds good to me," mutters Queen at your left.

"Do _you_ have car?" you counter, because it seems like a relevant question.

"It got blown up!" This is the first thing that Raya says to you specifically, and it might be the most indicative thing about Raya as a person.

"We can't fit six people in our car," says Queen. "You stay out here, you're gonna get _fried."_

"We can make it." The answer is stubborn and not altogether too realistic. The pair of them cut some unlikely and distinctive silhouettes, which unfortunately makes them stand out, and unfortunately makes them all the more likely to get shot down, especially from a distance.

In the interim, you've lost track of Haywire. You and everyone else, presumably, because _everyone_ jumps when she comes roaring up the incline on a motorbike that almost certainly belonged to a draculoid, if its stark white paint job is any indication. Her grin is toothy and gleaming, but not bright enough to disguise the pinkish cling to her teeth. 

It's doubtful that she was actively trying to solve the crowding problem. It just kind of worked out that way.

Five people is a tight squeeze, especially when one of them is the size of two people all on their own, but it's better than six people, and that means that all of you can speed away from the absolute chaos that nearly tore up half the road while you were still driving on it, even if it takes a hard half-day of driving.

Evening befalls you with the smell of petrichor in the sand and a stolen motorcycle and two more crash queens than usual gathered around your evening pyre, bearing witness to the same recruitment speech that Dust Devil gives everyone. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they're both quick to offer their support, and you get two more soldiers for Devil's army.

Mantarraya is small and incredibly short, even for a motor-rat, and she happens to have a knack of explosives. She's a few shades darker than you but slightly paler than the Queen. Her hair has been shaved close to the scalp except for the short tuft of dreadlocked braids that sweep to the left side of her face - the same side that has, from her brow to the underside of her jaw, been partially consumed by a pale sprawl of scarring that's rendered one of her eyes a sealed-shut slit. You would've assumed that this was a consequence of the Wars, or the Great Fires. It's not. Raya claims that she learned early on that she had a talent for mixing chemicals together to figure out which could present the biggest detonation, and her first forays into the field cost her an eye and a good chunk of her facial features. That hasn't deterred her in the slightest.

She carries most of her equipment on hand. The belt cinched tight around her too-narrow waist is heavy with pouches and unlabeled canisters with contents known only to her. She carries even more on a belt that she wears looped crossways from shoulder to hip, like an improvised bandolier. Raya is small enough to make do. Her clothes are mostly too big for her. They all look like they were meant to be worn by people with far more money to spare than a handful of Zone-rats, or they would if they weren't crinkled and battered and discolored.

"This is Titan. The _más_ to my _menos,"_ she says of her silent companion, nudging them with one bony elbow. Raya, like Rocket, like Haywire, like so many others, is worryingly thin in a way that suggests that the unshielded heat and radiation in the Zones is steadily eating her alive. "Titanium, I guess. 100%. Just call 'em Titan."

Titan raises one hand and with it makes a gesture that you don't recognize.

"Quiet, aren't they?" mutters Devil, eyeing them skeptically.

"You'd be quiet too, if a scarecrow cut out your tongue," says Raya shortly, which effectively ends the conversation.

Titan is impressively large, impressively meaty, and impressively well-built, especially given the general conditions of the Zones. They're slow but solid, capable of picking up and carrying any one of you with almost no difficulty at all. Their hair falls unevenly in a dark, shining sweep. Most of the time, they yank it back with a bracelet or loop of string. Their vest is a bright pink patchworked with spots of color; they're practically a beacon even without their imposing size. They wear a half-mask that covers the lower part of their face and boasts a built-in filter that's the envy of everyone else in the group. Aside from the sheer breadth and height of them, the most notable thing about them is that practically every article of clothing on their person appears to be heavily patched. 

On further inspection, the patches prove to not be patches at all, but _pockets_, sewn haphazardly onto every possible inch of surface area. The parts of their vest and pants and shirt not bulging from whatever is crammed into each pocket glitter with worn pins, or are stitched with patches. Not much of their amber-colored skin is visible beneath the layers of fabric, but the parts that peek through are riddled with the pale crisscrosses of old scars. Their eyes are thin and dark.

Raya isn't exaggerating about their injury; whenever they open their jaw, you can see the too-hollow, ravaged topography of their mouth, fenced in by grayish teeth. They have difficulty swallowing, difficulty eating. They compensate by making motions with their hands that none of you can decipher, but that Raya can read with apparent ease.

"What were you doing, messing with a whole bunch of dracs like that?" Queen asks the two of them. Dust Devil had been plenty admiring, but Queen is _critical_ and it shows in his tone.

Titan makes several motions with one hand. Raya watches, sidelong, then turns back to Queen to translate.

"They were heading somewhere. Twenty or thirty of them, taking cover from the acid wind."

_"Thirty?"_ Haywire laughs. "What the fuck. You don't see them in _those_ kinds of numbers these days."

"We think they were sent to wipe out a nearby radio station," says Raya, shrugging. "Doesn't matter. With a group that big, I thought a scarecrow'd be with them, but I guess not."

Titan lifts their hand, signing something else, but Raya doesn't repeat whatever it is.

"You're _looking_ for scarecrows?" Queen has his eyes narrowed.

Titan opens their mouth, points at it.

"One scarecrow," says Raya flatly.

Perhaps that isn't so surprising.

It's clear that they've been traveling together for some time, just by watching them. Raya has no difficulty reading Titan, nor do they her. They cut an odd pair - her, small and bony and prone to blowing things to pieces, and Titan, massive and slow-moving and disarmingly gentle. This doesn't prevent them from cracking their knuckles or popping their neck in a show of exaggerated force when it looks like a clap might be imminent. It's incredible the kind of effect that an unblinking, sustained stare from Titan can have on someone thinking to start some trouble.

Their pockets turn out to be packed with medical supplies: needles, butterfly bandages, gauze, plastic tubing. Their fingers are surprisingly deft, in spite of their size, and they have a talent for sewing together skin as well as cloth, for braiding twine and hair alike, for snipping away threads with a delicate precision. They show you how to knot your hair back when the wind picks up and it starts wrecking your visibility, how to make careful, minute stitches in skin, and how to repair a tear in fabric. In return, you show them how to flame-sterilize tools and how to draw blood and how to tie a tourniquet.

They don't set out to teach you how to read their hands. Piecemeal, you start to learn anyway simply by watching.

The pair of them travel with the rest of you a little awkwardly, moving via appropriated draculoid motorcycle behind or alongside Devil's car. Raya proves an interesting and useful acquisition when she tosses what she helpfully calls a "smoke bomb" at a pursuing band of dracs and succeeds in getting two of them to crash into one another. Titan proves a worthwhile investment by being capable of picking up a drac without any obvious strain and flinging it into its fellows, and then later by demonstrating that they know how to clean and bandage a flash-burn on Queen's knee.

So your group gets larger. Six killjoys isn't enough to draw Better Living's eye in any specific sense, but they're still combing the sands for rebels to turn into ghosts. The difference now is that a good half of the time, you're the ones forcing them into a retreat instead of simply trying to not get killed.

The goal, Devil says, is to make it so that BLi is forever running from _you,_ and not the other way around.

It's questionable how realistic this is as a goal, but you can't deny that it feels better than forever running away.

****

**\--**

**(if they come  
swear up and down you're holy)**

**\--**

Titan doesn't have a color or shade to them the way everyone else does, but that's probably because everyone else can actually speak. The Devil is a vibrant orange, the Queen a muted green, Haywire a sickly yellow, and Raya an eye-searing shade of electric blue. Titan's color is in their heavy footfalls, in the sound of their breath, in the occasional huff of their laughter: a deep and rich red-brown, like drying blood backlit by the sun.

Most nights they're the easiest to sit next to, aside from Queen, who doesn't mind your silence and who knows you don't care if she smokes. Neither of them expect conversation out of you, and they know to seek you out when they have a need for that sort of quiet. There are times when one of them finds you up later than you should be, listening to the radio without really hearing it or squinting at the fuzz of smog visoring some of the stars from view, and does little besides sit a foot or so away and stare at the sky beside you in utter silence. Neither Titan nor Queen have yet asked what it is you're doing on those nights, or why you might be doing it. You're studying the stars, straining to remember the names of things that you and Nova once handed out to each of your made-up constellations. In spite of your best efforts, those old names are sliding from your memory like loose sand underfoot. It's getting harder and harder to hold onto the details of what things were like before their last words and the last image you have of them were forever emblazoned into your mind.

You can remember _those_ things a little too well. Everything else falls to the wayside. But if you're going to relive those select parts of your past, you'd rather dredge those memories up consciously rather than seeing the faces of your ghosts every time you shut your eyes and having them wrench you violently awake.

Titan finds you when everyone else is sleeping. They're awake because they're keeping watch until the unrelenting chill of the night gives way to the more tolerable cool of the desert's early morning. You see them realize that you're up and sitting away from the rest of the group, who all seem to pretty solidly out at this point, and then adjust their stride until they're moving your way.

You know that Titan wakes abruptly some nights, making choking sounds and snapping hands up around their throat. In those moments, Raya's the only one who can calm them down. So you think they understand why, sometimes, it's easier to simply not bother sleeping at all.

They also know you don't mind it when they join you. Still, you can just make out the question in their eyes, barely visible through the gloom and through their overlong bangs, when they draw near.

Not everyone asks. It's a courtesy that doesn't go unnoticed.

You nod.

For several long minutes, neither of you make any attempt at discussion. Titan is content not to force you to comment aloud on anything, and you're just as content to let silence proliferate without any particular pressure to break it. Eventually, though, they look at you and incline their head faintly in the direction of the rest of the group.

The question there is evident. Everyone is asleep, and you're not.

You shake your head, lifting one shoulder in an incremental shrug.

Titan tips their chin upward to indicate the sky, the faint spread of stars.

With difficulty, you strain to recall the exact shapes to make with either hand. It's not exactly easy. You don't think you can ever remember Titan referring to "stars" in specifics, so you simply do your best to sign: _I like them._

Titan looks at you with undisguised surprise. Evidently, they didn't expect you to make your explanation via that method. They twitch slightly, like they're about to respond, then shake their head with a very slight smirk instead.

Your sign language isn't the greatest, you'd presume.

Again, you shrug. You were never, strictly speaking, taught. You point two-fingered at first yourself and then at Titan, angling your head in a clear question.

Titan's eyes light up, and they nod at once.

Yes, then.

Yes, they'll teach you.

It's secondary to almost everything else, and not something that either of you do around the others, at first. Queen or Raya might understand, even sympathize, but you're certain you don't want Devil or Haywire to see, and Titan doesn't seem keen on raising their awareness to any of this either. It's hard to determine why that might be your instinct. You just...don't want them to see you in the process of learning it, of tripping and stumbling and saying something completely wrong because you're trying to keep track of where to place your hands. They need you to be deft and certain and good at what you do. You need them to view you as someone competent, because there are too many gaps in your knowledge base for you to know _everything_ that you should to keep them all alive.

It gets easier as you go on. It gets easier, too, to tap Titan gently on the shoulder and sign that you're going to need their help with replacing one of the car's tires, or to ask them if they can braid your hair to keep it out of your face while you're driving.

"Christ," mutters Haywire, watching one such exchange warily. "'Course _you_ two would know how to talk to each other."

She manages to tweak the words into something of an insult. You frown slightly, but Titan only nudges you.

_You know it's because she can't be bothered to learn,_ they say.

You bite your cheek in an attempt to fight back the grin that threatens to tear across your face. You flip them off instead, which means they elbow you harder, and you stumble so heavily that you bang your hip against the car and have to grab at the sun-heated hood to steady yourself. Haywire rolls her eyes and walks on. You're still trying to hold back the smile that's cutting its way out anyway. Titan is laughing, their massive shoulders shaking silently.

You'll remember forever the feeling of their hand on your head, warm and slightly too large. They're taller than you, the way that not many people are. There is nothing about this moment, among so many others, that feels particularly noteworthy, that feels like it will commit itself to your memory and remain outlined in the soft gold light of the rising sun. But you want it like this. You want memories, _god_ \- you want memories that aren't the faces of people you've lost, people you've hurt, people you've _failed_ by not being fast enough or precise enough or _ready_ enough.

So you make a promise to yourself.

You promise yourself that if you remember nothing else, if you can think of nothing besides the death and pain and constant running and the sound of rayguns and the roar of a motor, that you will not forget _this_ moment. You'll keep it locked in amber in the recesses of your thoughts: Titan's hand on your head and their silent, infectious laughter, Haywire's derisive scowl, the feel of the car beneath your hands and how it's slightly too hot to the touch - 

You want to remember this. You want it bottled up, displaced from the graveyard of the rest of your memories.

You want to remember that, for a moment, even in the rough sands and the heat and the radiation and the dying - that for a moment, you were happy.

Then Devil interrupts by walking between the two of you, snapping at you both to stop fucking around so that you can try and get somewhere before the sun's too high up. You watch Titan follow Raya to the motorcycle, so they can help her in applying a coat of paint to its blank white frame, laying claim to it and wiping away its BLi history. Later, you borrow the can of paint to lay a fresh layer of color your raygun - blue, the same shade the word _Jet_ has always felt in your head.

Like Devil, the pair of them have a purpose in their wandering, only Devil's end goal is of a much vaster and wider scope, infinitely more ambitious. Cut down BLi and make them suffer for the Analog Wars. Titan and Raya's ultimate desires are much smaller, and subsequently seem much more doable. They don't seem to mind the proverbial detour from the end goal of finding the scarecrow that severed Titan's tongue. They're not as singleminded in their joint drive.

You could ask them, you suppose, what the scarecrow looked like. If it was garbed in all black, mounted on a motorcycle, and whether it wore a helmet with a visor so dark that you couldn't see its face. You've never gotten a chance to find out if all scarecrows look the same - if, like dracs, they all have some sort of distinct, universal standard or uniform that they all must adhere to. 

If Titan expects to recognize the scarecrow that ripped out their tongue, maybe not. Maybe they all look different. You've never been able to think of the best way to organize the question so that you can speak it aloud in a way that makes _sense_, as usual. That's not an obstacle anymore.

The next time you get a chance, you ask Titan: _do they all look the same?_

Titan frowns. They must not be following.

You don't know the specific sign for the word, so you spell it out.

_S-C-A-R-E-C-R-O-W._

Their jaw tightens very slightly, almost imperceptibly. They look away. And then, curtly, they shake their head.

They're not keen on talking about scarecrows, even to you.

That's all right.

That's the only answer you need.

There _is_ something that distinguishes scarecrows from one another. They don't all look alike, though how they might differ from one another is anyone's guess. They're more than mere draculoids, after all. They're killers in a very unique, precise way, and more effective than the throngs of dracs that frequently miss their marks and have had their souls stripped away and can't think like killjoys.

If that's the case, there's a scarecrow _you're_ itching to find as well. You haven't forgotten the look of it, the _shape_ of it. How could you?

Like you said: you're willing to consider that it might be vengeance that motivates you.

****

**\--**

**you ask me if i love the stars and i say  
no**

**\--**

It's something like a handful of months later when that instinct is put to the test.

There's no disputing it now: BLi is unquestionably sending its forces out in higher concentrations, and when that doesn't work, they're jettisoning canisters of split-pea smoke into the sands to strangle the entire desert into submission. It's when a cloud of advancing limeade gas obstructs your entry to Zone Three that Devil calls for a retreat mid-firefight, because now your group is six killjoys strong and there are _still_ not enough filters or rebreathers between all of you.

Titan's been hit, though they don't seem to notice it. Haywire's been hit, and she _does_ seem to notice it. She's limping as she hooks one arm around the car door, hauls herself over and into the backseat, coughing. Raya has two belts' worth of chemical cocktails slung around her waist, and she's forced to relinquish most of them for the sake of giving the rest of you a smokescreen to escape. It's hard to breathe, harder still to see through the dust and the blinding, stinging smoke. Even with your bandana yanked taut around your mouth, you can still taste cinders and ash in your throat with each breath.

Queen yells something from the passenger seat. Devil's shouting your name. You can't draw in breath to answer.

Then there's a knot of dracs looming large in your sights, cutting you off from them. You clip one in the throat, fill another one's guts full of plasma, and the last tries to get a shot off on you but its reflexes are too slow and you light it up with a steady shot through the chest. There's another whitish blur closing in on you from your left, trying to flank you. One shot to its calf unbalances it, and a clean bolt through its eye finishes it off.

Somewhere between one shot and the next, you lose them. You have no idea of your position, no knowledge of who's ended up where, but at your six, draculoids are still shooting at you and you can't hear the hum of the motor anymore. You're being shot at, which means that the only choice you have is to take cover somewhere, _anywhere_. Find your crew after.

They have a car, and you don't. They can't know if you're dead or alive.

You can't worry about that right now.

Right now you have to survive and thinking about anything else is going to slow you down, so when a drac tries to rush you, you shoot its legs out and stamp it dead with a boot to its throat, pressing hard enough to hear the _crack_ of snapping bone. The next one that rushes you lasts a little longer out of necessity; you cave in its knee with a good kick, spin it around, hook one arm around its neck, and start retreating with the drac as your meat-shield. It gets hit with several bolts from its fellows, who don't care that they're murdering one of their own if it means they can get to you. It's a pointless effort, though. Lasers don't break and disperse the same way shots from old guns used to. If they were firing bullets, you'd be dead, but lasers can't eat through that much bone and flesh and muscle all in one blast, so it gives you enough time to back into what's left of Raya's chemical clouds, drop the drac in the sand, and start running.

You can still run like no one else you've met. You're faster than dracs when you're both on foot, but you can't know for certain that they're not packing some wheels, so it's a temporary solution at best. 

The plan, if everyone gets separated, is to regroup at Chow Mein's nearest place. The wisdom of picking Tommy Chow Mein's numerous establishments has more to do with him having one in every other Zone or so than it does with pissing him off, though Haywire had seemed plenty pleased by the notion. You can't head to Chow Mein's while you've got dracs on your tail, though, so you'll have to lose them first.

You're fortunate. Raya's chemical clouds might be fading, but the desert has something better teeming over the sands of Zone Four.

The storms out here are dust and dirt kicked up into heaving, buff-colored clouds on the horizon. Sandstorms differ from limeade in that they're universally dangerous, which means that dracs have about an equal chance of getting fucked up by plowing through one compared to your average killjoy. Nature's finest smokescreen.

It's not much of a plan, but without wheels, you don't have any other options. You wrench your bandana up, wrap it tightly around your mouth and nose, and brace yourself. Bolts of plasma still fry the sand at your feet. You shut your eyes when the first orange cloud sweeps over you and fills your ears with the howl and _hiss_ of sand.

Ordinarily, you'd hunt for shelter or high ground, but finding either of those things will make you stand out. You move until the sand feels like it's ripping the skin off your hands and the exposed parts of your face, and then you drop, clap your hands over your ears, and hunch to the ground in a crouch.

All that's left to do is to wait it out.

The dracs aren't shooting anymore.

Sandstorms out here are big. They always have been, Doublestar used to say, but with half the atmosphere seared away and more unstable than it should be, they've gotten bigger and they last longer. You know how to make it through one, even without shelter, even if right now you're ill-prepared for it. No water, no food, nothing but the clothes on your back and your gun. Living through a sandstorm is still living, no matter how much of you it rips away.

So you keep your eyes _shut._

The howl of wind and sand rushing against your skin ignites a whirlwind of colors in your head. It's easier to pay attention to that than it is to the fact that the exposed skin of your hands and face feels like it's all being flayed alive.

It's hours before the wind dies down enough for you to risk cracking your eyes open and peering into the hissing, buzzing, skittering sound of wind over dust. Your muscles have seized up from lying in your cramped, huddled position for so long. The upper part of your face and the backs of your hands are scored with the fresh, reddish welts of sandburn. Granules of sand have crusted onto your eyelashes, matted your hair into a tangled rope of knots down the back of your neck, lodged themselves underneath your fingernails and in every crease and fold in your clothing.

It's dark. It must be night by now. The heavy chill in your limbs would certainly align with this.

You uncurl slowly, painfully. You cough roughly, spraying the ground with the sand from your lungs. Your lips are parched; every inch of you feels drier than it should be.

But you're alive.

Getting to your feet is an equally excruciating process. You need to get your bearings and you need to get to Tommy Chow Mein's. This is the plan now. Hopefully, Dust Devil and the rest will be waiting for you at Chow Mein's and won't have assumed that you're dead.

So you straighten up, shake the sand from your hair as much as you can, and start walking. Sometimes the only way to regain a sense of direction in the Zones is to walk until you see something you recognize, and while you have a vague idea of where you are in relation to the desert at large - you have the faded patterns of the stars, barely visible through the clouded smoke muzzling most of the heavens, and last you checked you were still in Zone Four - that's not helpful in terms of finding someplace more specific, like Tommy Chow Mein's.

You cough, spit more sand into the dirt. You keep walking.

With luck, you'll end up in a place that has water.

The sun starts to rise. It peers over the line where the sand meets the sky in a warm, reddish band of rusty light. The brilliantly multicolored sunrise has begun to faded into a muted, silvery mercury when you catch something in the field of your vision, and the mere sight of it arrests the tempo of your heart, makes your bone-dry throat go even drier.

You see it before it sees you - a familiar silhouette, slender and dark and dense against the cream-colored gray of the midmorning sky.

Immediately, you drop flat to the ground, behind the breeze-ruffled scrub brush that spot the region. You're certain it hasn't seen you - not merely because its back is to you, but because you know from experience that when a scarecrow sees you, it doesn't stop until it's dead or you are, or until something gets in the way of it completing its objective.

Even from a distance, the sight of it is enough to twist at your guts like a knife to the kidneys. Fingers dig into the loose sand beneath your hands as they form into fists.

What's it doing out here, in the middle of Zone Four, without any apparent backup? Scarecrows don't travel alone. They've always got an entourage, always have a coalition of draculoids at their backs, and you lost that pack at your tail miles back. Haven't seen them since the storm. You scan the surrounding area for any sight of those crisp and unmistakable white suits, but there's nothing in the immediate vicinity. Not even a car. It's like this thing just got dropped off in the middle of the place from on high.

Or it was separated from its posse.

That's feeling significantly more likely.

It turns its head slowly. The light gleams off the smooth black globe of its helmet - round, visored, with a thick, striated hose rolling out of one side and curling around the back. Built-in filter, most likely. Got to keep safe from the fumes that BLi pumps into the fucking atmosphere.

Titan said they don't all look the same, and this one is eerily familiar. How could you forget the look of it - clad in darkened, slimming leather, face hidden beneath the dome of its helmet. Every time you've encountered a scarecrow, it's looked just like this, and every time, someone's died for it. Twice now, you've watched someone else take a hit that killed them, and it was always a scarecrow pulling the trigger.

You can't stay here. Dust Devil needs you to regroup at Chow Mein's, but you can't do that with this thing prowling the sands, probably on the hunt for an easy target. Maybe looking for the rest of its company of draculoids, wherever they are now. If they're still alive.

It starts moving toward you in a relatively oblique fashion. Its pathway can't be called "meandering" in any definition of the word, because nothing about scarecrows is ever meandering. They move with direct, unerring purpose. The scarecrow strides forward and it moves like it has a set path and set coordinates, with all the discretion and subtlety of a ballistic object. It is because it isn't moving straight _for_ you that you know it hasn't seen you, but if it were to change direction by just a few degrees, it almost certainly would. Its pace is also less brisk than it should be. Its gait is uneven. It's favoring one side of its body, as though it's injured on its leg or on its side or both. It's impossible, from this distance, to tell why.

Your breath stops in your throat as it moves past. It's maybe ten yards from you. But you're laid out on the lee of a slope's downward tilt, buried behind a few precious tufts of scrubby underbrush, just barely out of its periphery. If it were to come any closer...

It doesn't.

It keeps moving past at a sharp, limping clip.

It's not that much larger than you, on consideration. It isn't taller, it isn't broader, and it doesn't have a greater volume than your average draculoid. It _feels_ denser, though, just by looking at it, like a neutron star compacted into something vaguely human. It feels like it should be pulling at you, ensnaring you in its gravity well.

Its back is to you again.

You should go. You _could_ go. You could slide back, inch down the slope, cut a wide arc around the ground the scarecrow's already covered in the hopes that it won't retrace its steps, and find out where the hell you've ended up so you can regroup with Dust Devil and the rest at Chow Mein's. You _should,_ because that's what they expect you to do. 

The scarecrow is still moving while you're caught in the wreck of your own thoughts. Fifteen yards, now.

You can almost taste the tang, the tingle of mounting adrenaline in your blood.

You might be the best shot in the Zones. You can take a can off the hood of a car at one hundred and fifty meters.

The scarecrow is maybe twenty yards out. It cuts a distinct figure, mounted on the horizon with its arrhythmic, limping tread.

In half a second, you're on your feet. You move so quickly that it doesn't even have time to react. Maybe it's gravity, pulling you into standing, ripping you closer to the thing that could kill you. It's hurt. It's slower than it should be. It doesn't turn quickly enough, doesn't get its gun out fast enough to stop you, _Jet Star,_ the fastest pair of legs in the Zones. You fire, fire, fire _again,_ you _empty_ your goddamn gun, you do not fucking stop for _anything,_ you are moving forward and you are closing the distance between the scarecrow and yourself, and you're moving so fast and blazing through your raygun's power with such impunity that it's hard to tell, through the char and smoke sizzling off its slick, black front, if the buzz of plasma is having any effect on it at all.

When you're two paces from its fucking face, its hand snaps up and wraps around your throat with enough force to lift you bodily from the ground.

So: no, then.

You do not release your gun. You do not _stop shooting_ and you do not release your gun, but your free hand grasps at the thing's elbow. Its grip feels like iron, wholly inescapable. Adrenaline is still teeming in your system, igniting your nerves in a wash of molten lead. Panic hasn't set in just yet. You can see the places where the sheer amount of heat and electricity issuing from the barrel of your gun has burned through its jacket, eaten at the fabric below, but something about it must be shielded in a way you can't see, because its grasp feels stronger than should be possible. It's squeezing, pinching your trachea shut. You can feel the edges of your vision going shaded and feathery. Your gun - your gun isn't burning through the scarecrow's chest and stopping its heart the way it's supposed to. You're trying to take in air and all you're getting is a choking, strangled noise and the frantic throb of your lungs. Your chest is burning. Your heart, your ribs, it feels like every _part_ of you is burning because your brain is starting to send out signals that it's losing oxygen, and bit by bit, the rest of your body is starting to react accordingly. Screaming for release, straining for air, because the pressure's becoming _unbearable_ and the scarecrow _isn't letting go_ and you could have avoided all this, really. It's just that this thing or something that looked exactly like it shot Doublestar down so she could get yanked underneath truck tires and it shot Rocket twice in the back while they were running for their life so walking away was not and would not ever be an _option._

So they're dead, and now it's you who's dying here. You're dying because you were stupid. You're dying because you made a stupid call on behalf of dead friends who no longer exist and who _no longer matter,_ except the thought alone is enough to invert your insides and make you feel like the biggest traitor in the Zones.

That could also be the asphyxiation.

Is self-blame a symptom of asphyxiation?

Your sight's starting to gray out and the scarecrow is still holding you off the ground by your throat, so you take the one option that's still available to you, which is tilt the barrel of your raygun so that it's aiming for the scarecrow's elbow instead of the center of its mass, ignoring that the battery is chiming low, and squeeze the trigger.

The scarecrow was, apparently, not expecting you to be that mobile in a state of near-suffocation. It is also, apparently, not armored in the joints the way it is in its middle, and it releases you at once. You land heavily in the sand with a shuddering gasp that's as painful as it is freeing. Floods your system with a fountain of pale gold. You don't have time to gulp in oxygen, though, because the scarecrow is recovering from the smoking burn you've set into its arm by reaching for the gun strapped to its hip. The sharp, crisp, white lines of an Individual, the BL/ind-sanctioned raygun that people only ever pick off dead dracs.

You don't give it the time to draw. You've lost your gun, but that doesn't matter. You haven't even made it all the way to your feet before you're lurching forward, snapping arms around its middle, and _tackling_ it into the fucking dirt.

Its gun is only partway out of its holster. It scrambles to yank it all the way out. You're still gasping when your hand slams over its wrist, effectively pinning it.

You should have stuck to trying to pick it off from a distance. Close quarters, you're horrendously outmatched. The scarecrow is faster than you, stronger by far, and it shrugs off everything you throw at it. You think you'd be dead by now if you hadn't already incinerated it with more plasma than any one _person_ should be able to take. You flail, try to batter at its face, try to knock off its helmet, but every blow stings your knuckles and the thing feels impenetrable. You think you hear it _snarl_ under its visor as it catches your hands, twists your wrist hard enough for your fingers to arch into claws and for you to cry out once, in surprise and in pain.

The scarecrow smashes a fist across your jaw and you end up sprawled on your side in the sand. You can feel it moving, getting back to its feet, looking for its gun. Your sight's full of blisteringly white pinpricks, white like draculoid masks, white like bone, white like the cold light of the stars that BL/ind tried to shutter from the night sky.

The scarecrow is grasping for its weapon. And you - you have to get up.

You have to _get the fuck up,_ before it puts you down for good.

You did not crawl through years upon years of the desert's heat and BL/ind's ruin to die _here._

You roll to your hands and knees. The scarecrow has its gun in hand, halfway back to standing. It whirls around in time to shoot off, twice. One bolt catches you at your outer thigh, the other scorching you just beneath your collarbone and the pain is incandescent. You're down with no backup and two flash-burns and you're alone. You don't have anyone coming for you to drag you back from this. You don't have anyone who knows you're here, who knows to save you from your own stupidity.

Its balance isn't back yet. It drops into a kneel, favoring its bad leg, half-turned away from you. It must think that it's done enough damage to keep you down until it can finish you off.

That's the first real mistake it makes.

Your heart's slamming up against the roof of your mouth and your leg will give out underneath you if you keep on it for much longer so you do not fucking hesitate. Again, you don't quite make it to your feet, but you're upright enough to more or less lob yourself at its back and lock your arms around its neck. It staggers. It tries to counter the fact that you have hung your own absolute dead weight around its throat, more or less garroting it with nothing more than your hands and arms, but you're at too awkward a position and it can't get its gun aimed at you. Several shots hiss off into the sky with the high whine of screeching electromagnetism. The heat of it singes your cheek, fills the air with the stench of burning hair, but you don't let go. You _do not_ let go. Your leg is burning, the pressure of the crow's body against your own lighting up the laser patch left across your chest in a white-hot patch of unfurling agony. Your teeth grit. Your teeth grit hard enough to _hurt_ like everything else. The scarecrow tries to duck forward, tries to use your own momentum to send you cartwheeling over its head. You're taller than it is. You kick your feet forward, lock them around its shins. The place where the laser's scorched through the denim of your jeans and torched your thigh blazes furiously in protest, and for a few blissful seconds your brain simply shorts out as it stops taking in new input and the resultant numb is a mercy. Then the scarecrow's knees give out. It folds forward with an immediacy that indicates that you've just hit it where it hurts - or, more likely, where it's still healing. You can feel the fabric of its jacket beneath your fingers, and below it, barely, the frantic, rhythmic kick of a living thing's rabbiting pulse.

It lives, it breathes, it bleeds. Which means it can be killed.

You squeeze tighter.

You do not let go.

It pulls muscles beneath your clavicle, itches a plume of white and red from where the scarecrow's fire caught you across the chest. Holding on like this is nothing short of excruciating.

You do not let go.

You _do not_ let go.

You strangle it slowly, the same way it tried to strangle you. Only it was stoic and soundless and almost robotic in its one-armed efficiency, and you've attached yourself to its back in a spur-of-the-moment decision to keep fighting in the only way you could think of, all the while trying not to black out from the pain or vomit.

The scarecrow falls forward. Your nose bashes the back of its helmet from the impact when it falls, thuds limply against the dust.

You do not let go.

If it's smart enough to have better aim than a draculoid, it might be smart enough to fake its death.

You do not let go.

Your stomach's in knots. You can feel the hot trickle of blood down your leg, the smoking burn laid into your chest. You can feel them because they are the only parts of your body that you can still feel and you can still feel them because they hurt. You can't breathe. You can barely _think_ because everything has closed off into gray-on-white, the bleed of flash-burns and smoke curling off your flesh and the weight of the scarecrow twitching underneath you.

You do not let go.

Every part of you hurts. Every part of you _hurts_ and you can feel your vision snowing in and out like a signal gone static.

You _do not let go._

Except you can't fucking breathe, and eventually your arms, pinned beneath the weight of a fallen scarecrow, start to go numb like the rest of you.

You have to get up. Untangling yourself from a fallen scarecrow takes several long, panting, painful moments. You retch, shaking, and the force of it, the pained contracture of injured muscle, nearly causes you to black out. The gasoline wiring of your nerves lights up in a red-on-white symphony until, with an effort so immense that your lungs seize up in your chest and you feel your vision blur out again for a half second from the strain, you roll onto your back away from the scarecrow and lie there, gasping at the sky while your heartbeat regularizes and your sight starts to return. Everything is a bleached-out gray for a minute, until the absolute fire splashed over your chest and at your thigh starts to recede to a more manageable, persistent burn - so it feels like only those two specific parts of you are on fire, and not every single fucking atom in your wind-battered, pulverized, shot-up body.

Sweat sticks grains of sand to your neck, to your hands, to your hair. The sky hurts to look at. You shut your eyes.

The temptation to continue lying here, possibly forever, is a fluid close and drag at the weight of your limbs, heavy in the desert. Your bones feel leaden. It might very well be nothing more than gravity, pulling you forever down. Perhaps if you just continued to lie here it would eventually claim you - dragging you deeper and deeper into the sand until at last you'd breach solid earth and sink into the denseness of bubbling magma and you wouldn't mind that, necessarily, except that as far as deaths go it wouldn't be the most comfortable one.

You'd rather not die surrounded by flames. Statistically, though, it seems pretty likely.

You're not dying _here_, though, so you open your eyes and roll onto your elbows and knees in _spite_ of the agony and get up, slowly, painfully, coughing as you wince through the bruises that you know have started to darken around your throat. It hurts to lever yourself up onto your leg. Each breath rasps in your lungs, scrapes charred flesh against your clothing. Your sight keeps going out, buzzing blurry. You probably shouldn't be moving as much as you are.

You sit awkwardly, your injured leg stretched out in front of you, so you can assess the damage you've caused. Two shots in exchange for a dead scarecrow. You've seen worse trades in your lifetime.

The front of the crow's jacket is still smoking. Holes have been fried into the leather from how completely and thoroughly you filled it with plasma. Eventually, you feel stable enough to grasp for the front of its jacket, even though the motion ignites a hot wash of red from the friction of cloth over a fresh-charred laser burn. You might be shaking, you might be _shot,_ your throat might be dry, but you know good equipment when you see it. Scarecrows are outfitted to last for long stretches of time in the desert. There has to be something worth taking. You've never brought down a scarecrow before, but there _has_ to be.

The helmet comes first. There's a savage satisfaction in ripping it away, unmasking the thing that's been haunting you for years. The helmet rolls out into the dust. 

The face underneath is disconcertingly ordinary.

Flaxen hair, cropped short. Pale skin. Hazel-colored eyes open, gazing emptily at the sky. Freckles, faint and powdering the edges of its cheeks and the bridge of its nose.

The most immediate difference between you and the thing lying dead on the ground in front of you, aside from the obvious shifts in palette of skin and cloth, is the fullness to its face and the hollowness to yours. Scarecrows don't scrap for food and water and spend half their nights awake and they don't suffer for it. It's a human underneath that helmet, but it's a well-rested, well-fed, and physically healthy one, and the difference is so immense that you may as well be a separate species entirely.

Its jacket is buttoned tightly, all the way up to its chin, so not an inch of skin shows. That doesn't matter now, so you start to strip the body with a grim efficiency. Clothes in good condition are hard to come by out here. It doesn't matter who or what they belonged to. 

The jacket's a lost cause, and so is the vest beneath, but you keep the latter anyway because it looks like it's the part of the scarecrow's apparel that was built to withstand multiple laser blasts at point blank range, which means it's worth examining. It's remarkably heavy in your hands - definitely not made of ordinary cloth. Underneath those layers, a necklace of black and purple bruising encircles its throat. You start loosening the gloves from around its wrists and then you stop at what you find underneath.

A dark line of scar tissue where the heel of the scarecrow's palm meets the underside of its wrist. A fat vein of keloid that swells the skin into a bulging seam. You tug the glove away completely, inch down the sleeve of its shirt, and there's another scar that intersects with the first, running all the way down the length of its inner arm and disappearing beneath the dark cloth of the sleeve.

It's not just the arms, either. The more of the scarecrow's skin you uncover, the more interlocking, intersecting lines you find. Long tracks of hard tissue go from both of the crow's inner arms to its elbows, the backs of both its wrists to its shoulders. Sealed cuts run the length of its hips to its ankles. A long, Y-shaped incision that starts where the ends of its clavicle meets the joints of its shoulders, and terminates just above the navel. A knotty rope of raised tissue running up the length of its spine, like a gout of fleshy oil bubbling out from the crease of its back.

Your injuries are bared to the elements, throbbing with a steady and relentless persistence, but your heart has slowed and your breath has started to steady. The longer you look, the harder it gets to hold onto that superficial state of calm. You can feel the beat of blood in your ears. What you've just found, the evidence you've peeled back from underneath a scarecrow's gear, feels suggestive of something greater. Forming a picture you don't want to look at.

You shut your eyes against the pain and the shimmering desert heat and think over what you know about scarecrows.

Not much.

You were never afforded the time or occasion to learn much about them. The first time you encountered one you learned in no uncertain terms just how dangerous they could be, and by then no further explanation was needed. You know they're rarer by far than draculoids, which frequently haunt the sands, and rarer still than exterminators, which you've only glimpsed near the City and are seldom very far away from it. Scarecrows are, without question, more reliably dangerous than either of them. Twice you've encountered one and twice you've lost someone for it, so you feel you have the experience necessary to say that they're undeniably the most consistently lethal footsoldier BLi has in its possession. More efficient than exterminators and more accurate than dracs and more brutal than either of them. They number fewer, though. Significantly fewer.

Why, then, would BLi _not_ fill their ranks with scarecrows, and nothing but? Why not replace the hapless dracs, which oftentimes suffer critical failures of common sense, or the exterminators, which are frequently prone to human error? It's inefficient to expect the other two to be anywhere near as effective as a single scarecrow, and BLi is nothing if not ruthlessly efficient.

The answer is laid out in front of you already.

They _would_, if it were that simple. You can be certain of that. They would, but they _can't,_ because scarecrows take _time_ and _work_ and _additional resources_ to create, or train, or recruit, or whatever it is they do to manufacture them. Scarecrows are unique. They would have to be. They must have certain requirements that make it impossible to mass-produce them.

The evidence is right there. Long cuts, straight and careful in a way that _assures_ you that they were made intentionally. The precision and care in the parallel nature of the scalpel tracks - it all looks _wrong_ to someone like you, accustomed as you are to the asymmetry of everyday living.

So. Now you know _why_ scarecrows are the way they are. You don't know, exactly, _how_ \- but you can guess. By the lines carved into the dead crow's arms and legs, the neat slices into its flesh, you can _guess._

Abruptly, you have to look away.

Several breaths. In. Out.

You look back, and the yawning horror of the thing you've just uncovered in the sand seems less overpowering.

You've seen worse things.

You gather up the scarecrow's belongings, the ones that can still be salvaged - helmet, boots, gloves, vest, pants - and wad them into an easily carried bundle. The shirt has to be sacrificed for the sake of bandaging your leg and trying to shield the burn across your chest; you know better than to leave them exposed for too long. Not after leaving wounds open and untreated nearly killed you. _Wrap it in something clean._ The friction is searing and it's unbearable. You've got no choice but to bear it anyway, because you're not dying here.

The trek to Tommy Chow Mein's is going to be a painful one, and the dead scarecrow is still at your back, face up to the methane sky.

The shifting wind and sand will bury it. Eventually.

****

**\--**

**call it what you want  
a flame veering into a field  
a sun searching for its double**

**\--**

You don't pass out at Tommy Chow Mein's threshold, though it's a near thing. You only _mostly_ pass out, drop against the wall and breathe out, trying to steady yourself with each shuddering gasp. Your heart's a throbbing wreck, struggling to push blood through your beleaguered body and bleeding you out faster as a result.

Chow Mein recognizes you - you can tell by his scowl. It costs you the dead crow's vest, gloves, and pants just to get your hands on real, actual bandages and rubbing alcohol and a bottle of water. It's impossible to tell if his prices are always that jacked or if he's screwing you specifically because you defanged a conflict the last time you were here, but you're wind-torn and sandburned and shot and bleeding and exhausted so it doesn't matter if you have to hand over some of your looted goods just to make it to next week.

Once you've cleaned out the burned-out shit from your leg, after you've bit through your cheek and bandaged the injury on your chest and tried not to _look_ at your chest while doing it, which is a task unto itself and didn't really work out so great because now your head's spinning and there's nausea clenching at your guts, you sit back against the back of the building Chow Mein has co-opted for his business endeavors and try not to dry heave into the dust. Every time you convulse, retch at the ground, it ignites another tightening band of agony around your chest. Your head's light and spinning, even if you've drank enough water by now to fend off the worst of your dehydration. Drinking slowly in sips has done nothing to stave off the incipient nausea threatening to double you over. You know better than to guzzle down the rest, not that it helps. The yellowed stink of your own stomach acid in the sand is a fair reminder of why you _need_ to take it easy right now.

No one's back here. No one saw you peel back the layers of your shirt and clean out the scabbing, burned patch of skin and muscle flared out across your left pectoral. No one saw you shut your eyes and look _away_ from the parts of yourself you didn't want to see when you rinsed it out with rubbing alcohol and then bit, viciously, into the skin of your wrist to keep from crying out. There are teeth marks stained red there, now. No one saw the reflexive tears leap into your eyes and _burn_ down the curve of one cheek. No one saw you double over, hunching around yourself, _hating_ the feel of your hand on your own bare flesh, wishing you could _rip it off_ and _burn it_ into nothing but cinders and fucking ash.

No one saw any of it.

You shrug your shirt back on, even if it hurts, even if it's torn and fringed with a gaping laser-burn in the middle. The napkins you've got wound around the injury mask the worst of it. 

You finish off your water.

You have a pair of boots that are in stronger and hardier than your own, and you have a helmet that looks like it contains a built-in filter, with the length of striated tubing that curves around one side of it.

It fits over your head easily. The visor tints everything a dim sepia-gray.

It feels wrong to be wearing it. It's a sort of armor, shuts the world out, but it's not who you can afford to be just now. You swap the your worn, sand-blasted boots for the crow's sturdier, darker pair. If you're lucky, Chow Mein will be amenable to lending you his radio.

You're not, and he's not. Your offer of your old set of boots in exchange for the _privilege_ of listening in on the airwaves earns you a wrinkled nose and a scowl.

"I need your radio." Your words sound rough and ragged from disuse, from being caught in a storm, from being _shot,_ from a long and painful hike to this place in the middle of Zone Four.

"This isn't a charity," snaps Chow Mein. "You get nothing unless you can pay for it. _Capiche?"_ You suspect that if you hadn't proven yourself willing to play the role of the paying customer, you'd have been run out of the place by now.

"I don't _have - "_ The word cracks, breaks halfway through, pitches up, and you grimace. You've never been one for words, but ever since your voice stopped being the acceptable pitch for a prepubescent boy, you've settled for saying very little unless it becomes absolutely necessary. Even with the words frayed from pain and exhaustion, they sound too high to your ears.

Chow Mein doesn't seem to notice. Or, if he does, it doesn't matter. He only sneers, because he doesn't need you to complete the thought to grasp what you're getting at.

"If you can't pay, then you can get out. You killjoys can't just barge in here and make demands like you own the place." 

"Log off, Chow Mein." The sharp snap of the words pair perfectly with the voice issuing them. The most you catch is a blur of pink and brilliantly blonde hair falling in a shining wave as someone elbows past you and thumps a massive pair of headphones onto the counter. "Quit pickin' on kids and tell me how much you want for these hot cakes here."

Tommy Chow Mein is an easy man to read. Once someone approaches him with a willingness to make a sale, he'll drop everything - even burgeoning threats of banishment from the store premises. He blusters and glares, but ultimately turns most of his attention to his newest customer. Anything to take their carbons.

Even with the powder of brown and yellow from the desert sands dusting the sleek black of their boots, they cut a distinctive figure with a jacket of hot pink leather, their fair hair glinting silver underneath the store's shitty overhead lighting. Transaction complete, they whip the pair of headphones from the counter and hook them around their neck, twist on their heel with a flare of jacket and hair, and grin at you. It's impossible to read their gaze underneath the wide pair of dark sunglasses perched on their nose, but their smile needs no further interpretation. Something about them feels off, though not necessarily in an unwanted sense.

It's hard to say what it is that feels so askew until you realize that they're wearing lipstick. Dark maroon, like the sky just after the sunset has faded into a warm ember-glow. They're the first person out here that you've seen that's been able to find or afford that kind of luxury.

"Don't let him get to you," the sunshine says. "Heard you were looking for a radio?"

Your throat's stripped, so you just nod.

"Shiny," they say, overly bright, the world almost singsong. "C'mon. We don't have to hang around this _kusojijii."_

"Don't _test_ me, Chimp," snaps Chow Mein.

"Can't boot one of your best customers," they answer, still far too brightly. "Think about all that lost revenue!"

Without waiting for him to work up an answer, they thread their arm through yours and more or less steer you to the door. You're too startled to do anything but allow them to lead you into the heat of the midday.

"You can thank me later," they say, the second you're out of the bright, unrelenting fluorescent lights and back under the bright, unrelenting sun. "Tommy'll charge you to breathe his _air_ if you let him. Little bitch won't let some starshine listen to a radio for thirty goddamn seconds. Please. It _is_ starshine, right?"

They're asking you. That's a first - that they actually bother to _ask._

You swallow, even if the gesture hurts, and you manage a nod.

"Jet Star," you whisper, though the words are faint and hissing and almost soundless. If your alarm is obvious to her, she doesn't comment on it.

"DJ Hot Chimp, earthshine." The name strikes you as familiar, like you've heard it said in old freqs and broadcasts, but you can't recall where it's come up specifically. "You listening for anything in particular?"

Yes. How do you say it? Yes, you _are_ listening for something in particular, but more importantly, you need to know if everyone else has been by here yet. You need to know if Dust Devil and the rest have been here and if they know to be looking for you or if they think you're dead. You need to find them and you need to find out if they know you're out here and there are a lot of things, actually, that you need to know but that you don't know how to communicate.

She's an earthshine. A DJ. She's a voice in the desert. She might have even been around for the Wars. And the more you think about it, the more you think that she must have. She must have been, because you remember her name, however vaguely.

"Rendezvous." The fragment is an awkward one, devoid of context, but you don't know how best to communicate the thought. Can she read sign language? You don't know how best to ask.

The DJ winces.

"Yikes. Let's get you some water. You look just about dried out."

She's not wrong.

There's a van parked outside Chow Mein's place, silvery and a little bulky but speckled with decals and daubed with colorful paint. Hot Chimp yanks the side door open with a smooth slide, and then you're looking at her radio station.

It's apparently a mobile one, recording and broadcasting equipment all piled into the back of van in a glittering cluster of snarled wires and blinking lights. Hot Chimp doesn't hesitate. She clambers into the thicket of lights and microphones and other instruments you can't put a name to and rummages around for a minute before extricating a pen and a pad of paper, and your relief at the sight of them is so potent that you feel like you might need to sit down.

Ten minutes later, DJ Hot Chimp is doing you one better. She doesn't just let you listen to her radio. She flicks on her microphone and starts speaking to the Zones.

"Hate to interrupt your mid-noon snooze, dandelions, but I've gotta shout-out for a box of crayons who might've misplaced one of their own," she rattles off, easy and noncommittal. "Any of you know the name of _Jet Star,_ he's waitin' for you at your _intended_ rendezvous point. Be a shame to let some other gang scoop him up. And if you're not listening, then that's one _hell_ of a loss."

It's not much. But Haywire has a radio, and Dust Devil likes to leave it on practically all hours. It's how you've familiarized yourself with the Mad Gear and Missile Kid, fallen in love with the fiery miasma those tones strike up in your head.

Your breathing's steadier now, even if your flash-burns still hurt. You wet your lips.

"Thanks."

DJ Hot Chimp glances back to you, hooks one fingertip around the bridge of her sunglasses and pulls them down. Her nails are painted an eye-searing shade of pink to match her jacket, though they're badly chipped. Her eyes are clear and dark.

"I'm a DJ, kid," she says simply, and for once there's no smile in the words. There's nothing in them at all save for a frank simplicity. "It's what we do."

You remember listening to deejays, hearing them chatter about the Wars. Offering insight, intel, warnings. You remember DJ Plastic Beat, how they were probably shot to death or had a mask strapped over their face right in their station.

Then the DJ repositions her sunglasses with a fluid upward slide, and her grin is back, a brilliantly white flash of teeth.

"Let's see if your crew knows to cut their losses."

****

**\--**

**discus-ing till heat envelops the latch  
the lick of pursuit  
as birds sight the scattered fruit**

**\--**

When Raya pulls the car up outside Chow Mein's a good eight hours later, Hot Chimp has gone her separate route, and everyone else is just surprised to find you alive. You can't fault them for that, you suppose; none of them knew you when you were dying. You have a shiny new pair of boots and a helmet doubling as a trophy as bragging rights, but no one has much for you in the way of celebration or even relief. The Queen smiles at you, small and strained, and Raya claps you on the shoulder with enough force to unravel a bolt of heat and pain from the impact left behind on your chest. The Titan offers to rebandage your injuries, a courtesy that you refuse. They might be one of the self-appointed medics of the group, but you'd rather no one handle those parts of you unless there's no other option available.

You haven't forgotten the blistering in your throat and the teeth marks on your wrist and the agony that had nothing to do with flash-burns so, no, actually, you'd rather you be the only one that handles your own messes.

The problem is that, during the initial clap that separated you from the rest of your crew, Haywire didn't just get shot. She also got a lungful of limeade. It didn't get to be obvious until hours after, when everyone else had already written you off as dead or a lost cause. You're certainly one of those things.

When Dust Devil catches up to the rest of you on the back of Haywire's appropriated motorbike, they don't have many words for you. There's shock, and mild appreciation that you made it back to the group alive, but mostly he's harried and distracted as they disappear through the door to Chow Mein's.

It's easy to forget how badly everything else hurts in comparison to what Haywire must be feeling right now - what she's _been_ feeling for the past two days.

All of you stay the night near Chow Mein's out of necessity. There's water here, even if Chow Mein charges an exorbitant amount for it, and if you leave now, there won't be enough to make it to Gertie's, the one person that Devil thinks might be able save the killjoy whose pulse has gone thready and erratic as she retches pus and mucus into the dirt. The problem is that it's farther than one can drive with a sick 'joy in the backseat, and carrying the amount of water that would be needed to keep her alive would mean the trip would have to be taken more or less solo. And carting that much water through the Zones - it as good as paints a target on your back. Route Guano is the one main artery in the Zones that can take you almost anywhere you need to go. The trade-off is that it's also crawling with dracs, and worse. You could take one of the many nameless, spidering tributaries of ruined roads instead, but those are less of a guarantee, and they'll assuredly take longer.

So, at the end of the day, there's nowhere else to go. You might not have even needed to enlist a DJ's help to get your crew back. They might have found you eventually out of desperation.

It doesn't matter so much in the end.

As far as any of you know, there's no antidote to whatever BLi pours into the atmosphere. There's only hoping that, by chance, Haywire didn't breathe in a lethal dose of the fumes that swam in the air. She's sweat-soaked and shivering in the back of the car, huddled against the weather-torn upholstery. Blisters have started to creep across the cracked contours of her skin. Every time her eyes slit open, they're watering and filmy, and the veins have swollen so that the whites are tinted pink.

You watch her hunch over the side of the car, pawing at the handle of the door until she topples out onto the sand and begins coughing. She hacks a gobbet of..._something_ into the dust, shivering. She's always been alarmingly bony in the arms and shoulders, despite the heaviness of her lower body; you're not sure where she's finding additional weight there to lose, but somehow she's started declining from unevenly thin to outright emaciated in places.

She was already dying before you even met her. You're not sure if Dust Devil noticed, or if he knows the symptoms and signs of it. You knew at once, the day Devil told you to pull over beside her, because you've seen the effects of that sort of ravaging illness, long-term. You know it to be why she charges into everything with her gun out and her eyes blazing. You know it to be why she never stops, never slows, never allows anyone to catch up to her. Why she encounters every obstacle with such vicious abandon. Why she never seems to care about what might finally kill her.

"There's nothing we can do?" whispers Devil to Titan for what must be the umpteenth time. "You're sure?"

The sky's growing darker and darker still, the desert cooling into a wind-blown chill for the night. None of you show any signs of planning on sleeping through it. Most of you are gathered near the car, keeping an eye on Haywire as she pukes her guts into the desert. Everyone's here, with the exception of Fever Queen. You're not sure where ze ended up. Maybe alone behind the store to smoke and get away from the sour, sulfuric smell of sickness radiating from the backseat.

Titan doesn't need to signal anything. Raya answers for them.

"We've seen it happen before, Devil," she says softly.

Devil closes their eyes. You see his throat convulse as they swallow, can almost visualize him counting back from ten.

"Do we know how bad it is now?"

The Titan nods.

"...how _bad_ is it?" Devil's tone is edgy and impatient.

"We need water," says Raya, reading Titan's signed speech. Even though your head feels like it's spinning from exhaustion, you can still tell that she's paraphrasing. "A lot more than we have now."

"We've _been_ giving her water," says Devil. "We've been trying to keep her clean, doing what we can - it's not enough."

It's been almost two days since the clap that separated you. If she hasn't flushed those toxins out of her system in two days, the end result feels like a given.

"We don't have what we need to help her," says Raya. She stops, frowns at Titan. Shakes her head very incrementally. When the Titan makes a few curt gestures with both hands, she sighs and runs her hand up through her locs. "They said that - it can take weeks, like this."

"Fuck you," says Devil, with zero hesitation. _"Weeks?"_

Not very efficient of Better Living.

But it does have the likely intended effect of forcing everyone to sit and witness the horror of watching their fellow zonerunner die slowly, in obvious pain, helpless to prevent the slow shutdown of her body as her organs necrose and her lungs fill with fluid.

The next day, Tommy Chow Mein actually leaves his establishment to tell you all to stop taking up space in the parking lot because your leering and loitering is scaring away potential customers. The "lot" in question isn't really a lot at all as opposed to a flat patch of earth where someone can kick up a parking brake without fear that the car will slide backwards into the sand. There's also no one else around, but when Dust Devil starts puffing up like they're about ready to start a firefight right here and now, you catch his arm with your hand and shake your head. Not with Haywire hemorrhaging into the backseat, dying. Not with you and Titan still shot and recovering. It isn't worth it.

Incredibly, Devil relents. The sound of Haywire spewing up more of her stomach lining probably helped settle the matter.

"We'll go to Gertie's," they say quietly, almost to himself. You're pretty sure that you and Queen are the only ones who hear them. "She can help."

Haywire won't make the trip. You all know it.

Titan and Raya share the motorcycle, driving ahead to spot your way while Devil floors the pedal and redlines the engine, Queen sat beside him. You're in the back with Haywire, because you're the one who knows the most about first aid aside from Titan, who wouldn't fit in the back alongside her.

It's not very surprising that she doesn't seem entirely with it. She's only semiconscious most of the time, until the car hits a bump or a pothole that jerks her awake, and even then, "awake" seems like a liberal term for it. Her eyes flare wide and you can see her quivering in a way that has little to do with the car's ambient shaking. The sluice of body fluid that's spilled onto the floor of the backseat has nothing on the smell of it. Tying your bandana firmly over your mouth and nose doesn't help much in curbing the reek of stale sweat, of vomit, of old piss, of blood and shit and pus as the sores spattered over Haywire's skin start to crack open and weep anew. You're probably putting yourself at risk of contamination by sitting back here, but everyone else is probably at risk already by now anyway.

Devil doesn't stop or slow down when the sun gets high in the sky and the heat reaches its peak temperatures. They only stop when the evening closes into freezing night. A cursory look at the fuel gauge confirms that this has less to do with flagging nerve and more to do with a more immediate, more utilitarian problem: gas.

Rather, the lack thereof.

"Get her out of the car." Devil slams the door as his boots hit sand, striding toward the dark mound of a ruined building fallen into a slant against the elements. Presumably, your shelter for the night. Titan and Raya eventually pick up on the fact that you're not following them anymore and loop around to pull to a halt beside the car. There's no question in either of their eyes.

Titan carries Haywire inside. She looks like she weighs nothing in their arms, skeletal and hunched against the skyline of Titan's silhouette.

You're not making it to Gertie's. Everyone knows it at this point.

Haywire gets a mattress of folded-up jackets and rags as she pants and sweats and bleeds and doesn't seem to sleep very much at all. You and Titan swap shifts keep watch over her, trying to get her to drink water, trying to do anything to cool the delirium that's eating her up from the inside. At one point, she flails out with one hand, tries to grasp at your arm. Misses. Tries again, connects. Her fingers are sticky with sweat.

"I'm n-not," she whispers, and her eyes aren't focused at all as she tries to look at you. "I'm not ff_ffff_ \- I'm not f-fucking dyin' like this."

The tacit request rests heavy in your chest. You shake your head.

"Don't be a f-fuckin' pussy, Jet," sneers Haywire. It's incredible that in spite of the way she's dribbling mucus and spit into the ground, she manages to bare her teeth in an impressive display of unbridled derision. "I ain't _dyin'_ like this."

You don't have an answer to that.

Rather, you don't _want_ to confront the answer that she wants you to have to that.

Your gun is a slim, familiar weight at your hip. It would take practically nothing, and she's asking you, edging closer and closer to _begging_ you, because that's what you do, right? You do what everyone else tells you. You have a role. You fit it perfectly because that's what's been expected of you and that's what you've _been doing_ this entire time, but you don't want this.

She's backed you into a corner. A piece of you that you don't want to acknowledge has to wonder if this was _intentional_, if she's clear enough in the head to try asking this of _you_ specifically, because she knows that you're the one most likely to listen. If she means to cultivate the subluxation of _who you are_ and force you into making that choice.

Does she know?

She must know.

She must know that now that she's said it aloud, that no matter her fate, its weight will rest on _your_ shoulders. She's passed the choice of whether she dies quickly or whether she dies slowly into your hands and you wish with everything you are that you could _hate_ her for that, but you can't because she's the one dying.

She's remarkably lucid. Haywire's fingers are vice-like around your wrist, but you can still feel the heat emanating her from her, feverish and rancid. Her teeth are orange when she bares them at you.

"I ain't goin' out like this."

You can't speak. You both know she is.

When you continue to shake your head, she snarls at you, calls you a bitch and a motherfucker and a dozen other things besides, half of them in other languages you don't know. 

In the end, it doesn't take weeks, like how Titan predicted. Haywire was eaten alive by the sickly cling of radiation long before BLi's chemicals got their claws in her. You don't remember when you fell asleep, when you drifted off and started dozing, but when you wake, Raya has her hand over her mouth, and Haywire is staring sightlessly at the ceiling, and your heart drops into your stomach.

You know the weight of this rests on you. You, and no one else, because you were the one she _asked._

Devil sets fire to the entire building. The roar of flames eating the wood skeleton of some anonymous old structure is the only funerary rite that Haywire gets.

Five days later, you slip her mask into a mailbox when no one else is watching and whisper a prayer to the Witch to guide her to the other side. You had to steal away to do it - Devil wasn't about to stop for the sake of a mailbox, and when you'd brought up the prospect of the Witch at all, Queen had snorted imperiously. It feels wrong, that people out where would refuse to think of Her as a constant in the desert, but you didn't have the words to argue your support of that killjoys' specter that ushers the dead to wherever they go next. So you have to slide Haywire's mask into the mailbox alone, and listen to it clunk softly as it hits the bottom.

A part of you can't help but wonder if a trade was made on your behalf, on a level you could not and were not ever intended to perceive: your life for hers. You lived, against all odds. She didn't, despite the fact that she should have.

You pray for her safe passage to wherever she goes next. She's not there for to make your apologies or justifications to, and she wouldn't listen even if she was, you don't think.

So that's the only option left available to you.

You pray. 

****

**\--**

**hunt me if you like  
i've grown sick of abstaining  
of sharpening this body like a holy sword**

**\--**

The goal now is to hit BLi back harder, stronger, _heavier_ than before. Devil doesn't seem surprised or particularly devastated by the loss of one of their own. By now, you're certain that every single one of you have lost someone. You know how it goes.

It does change things, though. His smiles are rarer, their tendency to catch onto your arms and lean up against you is notably absent most days.

"Always gets like this," mutters the Queen one night. Ze's become twitchier, more fidgety since Haywire. Zir hands shake a bit more, and zir focus seems...off. You suspect it has something to do with the distinct absence of cigarettes. Ze must have burned through the entire pack after it happened. Even if everyone else has got the shakes the way all former City rats do, Queen's are that much more palpable now. "It'll blow over. Always does."

You don't question how ze knows it. You've all lost people before.

Devil turns up Haywire's radio and leaves it on practically all hours, burning through batteries faster than zaps. You catch snippets of songs. Mostly, you listen to DJs rattle off the names of dead killjoys and report high concentrations of dracs. Sometimes you recognize DJ Hot Chimp's voice. Sometimes you hear others who _sound_ familiar but who you can't put names to.

When there aren't traffic reports and news reports and the occasional ads for people like Tommy Chow Mein, you bury your thoughts in the growl of the music frothing out from the static and speakers. It's easier to listen, and to let the colors and sounds play out behind your closed lids. It means you're not alone with the thoughts and memories of too many people who you've seen die by now. People die in the desert all the time.

She's with the Witch now. You have to have faith in that. Even if the Queen vocally doubts this, even if the Devil doesn't care.

You drive the car through the rain whenever it hits, unadvised as it is, because that's the only way you're going to be able to hose out the scent of Haywire dying. You listen to the airwaves. You watch Raya barter with other killjoys for certain fluids that she can use to bomb drac vehicles from a distance. You paint your stolen scarecrow helmet - keep the black varnish, but add a bright yellow lightning bolt that flashes down one side, because you're faster than anyone else you know, and the spot of color would annoy BLi on principle. It has a built-in filter, just as you might have guessed. You can face limeade clouds as they go rolling out across the dust without fear, surprise dracs by taking them down from inside their own poisonous smokescreen. Dust Devil procures a pair of aviators from a dried-out corpse baking in the sun, and wears them constantly so you can't tell what he's looking at. Raya blows up a BLi vending machine and nearly takes down the gas station adjacent to it, and now the five of you know to avoid a very particular part of Zone Six.

The rest of Zone Six, though - it's the furthest out from the City, and therefore where the skies are clearest. You can see the most of the stars from here.

"God, Devil's being a prick," mutters Raya. She passes you a can of something with a bright orange and yellow aluminum label. You, her, and Titan were lucky enough to uncover some old cans of lukewarm soda in the trunk of a car half-buried in the sand a few days ago. The bubbles might have gone flat, but the syrupy sweet taste is still there. It almost makes your teeth ache with how much stronger it is compared to literally anything else you've ever tasted. The caffeine makes your heart thud a little faster. The sensation is...new. Not unpleasant.

You sip at the can. Its labeling identifies it as _Neptune Pop._ Whatever it is, it's sugary and not as fizzy as it's meant to be and virtually indistinguishable from any of the other cans you've drank from tonight, cut with the taste of Raya's mouth. You pass the can to Titan, who finishes it off in two gulps.

_They always are,_ says Titan. _It's just worse now._

"Yeah," says Raya. She doesn't complete the thought. All of you know _why_ Devil's acting the way he is.

Raya fishes another can out of your trove and opens it with a tinny crack and a hiss. She drinks once, sighs, hands the can to you. She picks at her mask, hanging from its string at her belt. It's orange and yellow and when she wears it, it only covers the undamaged half of her face. You suppose there's not much point in covering up the rest.

"You'll drop me off at the Witch's place when it's my turn, right?" says Raya, abruptly, seemingly apropos of nothing. Titan looks at her with a frown cut into their face, but you've lost enough people to know that you can never really know when someone's last day will be, so you simply nod.

_That's not going to happen,_ says Titan.

"It could," says Raya. "It will eventually. You don't know. No one ever _knows_ when it's going to happen. Haywire didn't."

She did, you don't say. She knew it was coming. She knew it was inevitable. It's part of why she acted the way she did. She simply - didn't account for how much sooner it would happen than what she must have expected.

And she asked you. She asked you to do it.

You still can't shed the feeling of her fingers around your wrist.

You're certain that Titan catches the subtle tremor in your hand when you pass the can to them.

"You think Destroya's ever coming?" Raya whispers.

The question is so unexpected that you look at her sharply. Titan watches you do it.

_What?_ you signal to her.

"Everyone used to say..." Raya trails off. Titan hands her the can of Neptune Pop. She accepts it without drinking from it. 

She's never commented on where she came from. Some people mention it of their own free will, but most don't. You're relatively sure that she's from the City, the same way the Queen and the Devil are. The same way Doublestar and Nova and Rocket and Coma had been. She's never brought it up, and neither has Titan, but it's possible, probable even, that they knew each other in the City. She and Titan both have all the signs of people who used to live there. They've got the muscle tremors, the erratic chills and fevers that sometimes wrack them on the difficult nights, and all the signs you've come to recognize as symptomatic to deviation from BL/ind's medicated regimes. You can't really know unless you ask, though, and you know better than to ask. If it doesn't get brought up of its own accord, it's not meant to be talked about.

_Everyone used to say._ You still remember the words you read from a shelf in Tommy Chow Mein's - words about the dissolution of a City, about the stopping of electricity. It was the destitute droids of Battery City who raised their hands and heads to Destroya, until the whispers began to spread with increasing scope, and Rocket could recite them by heart.

You imagine it like a great metal plateau arrayed beneath the sands, vibrating like the hood of a car when the motor runs. You picture it massive and far-reaching and _waiting_, tensed to surge out from the desert and lay waste to the City.

Waiting for what?

"Just wish we'd know when it was coming," says Raya. "That's all."

She takes a long drink, sets down the can, and flops back to lie face-up in the sand, staring at the sky.

You lie down beside her, your shoulder an inch or so away from hers. Almost touching, but not quite. Titan remains where they are, and stares idly at the sky.

For several moments, you lay there in silence.

Raya burps.

The sound of it is so unexpected, so immediate, that it makes all three of you jump.

Almost at once, Raya starts to unravel - devolving into a high, uncontrolled burst of laughter. Titan's shoulders begin to shake. Half a second later, you're doing the same. You press your face into Raya's shoulder, like that might conceal your smile, the white flash of teeth. You can feel her trembling against you as she continues to laugh, hear Titan uttering a faint wheezing sound.

It bubbles out of you like something bright and merciless. It's almost a relief when it emerges, because finally some of the tension in your shoulders and in your heart and in your jaw, the hard clench in your muscles that's been locked in place ever since Haywire, starts to ease.

It feels, inappropriate as the association must be, the way digging a grave felt.

Like you've lanced some boil, like you've broken some dam, and now everything can come boiling out. You laugh, and it lets a little bit of the snake venom out of your blood. You laugh, and you feel a little less like dying afterward.

It's another moment for which you want to hold yourself accountable - another moment that you don't want to see slip away between the cracks.

Even if it's preceded by something terrible, it's a memory you don't want to lose.

****

**\--**

**there were once ten thousand shining behind me  
my flag burnt copper at the edges**

**\--**

Haywire died because of bitter circumstance. Fever Queen dies because ze saves your life.

The deal is that the motorcycle is out of gas and instead of trying to force everyone to fit into the car again, Devil has you and Queen take a couple of spare gas cans and hike out to a coil of smoke on the horizon to see if it belongs to a group that might be willing to make a trade, and Queen's the best excuse for a diplomat that the crew has. He picked you, you know, because you're there to handle things if they start going Costa Rica. 

The trip is uneven, seeing as you both have to walk, but it's not that far out. It's just that there was an earthquake a few days ago and so the ground's more unstable than usual, the sand sending the pair of you sliding to and fro without much warning.

While the smoke does belong to a band of zonerunners who've set up a fire, they don't look very happy to see you.

"Hey," says Queen, the designated talker between the two of you. "You guys wouldn't happen to have any spare gas, would you?"

The band of rats exchange glances. There are four of them total, all obviously armed. You resist the urge to settle your hand against the raygun holstered at your hip. The possibility that the act would be interpreted as a challenge is too great.

They have a car, though. A boxy looking vehicle with massive tires - a type of utility truck or a modified van, you think.

The silence stretches out so long that you start to wonder if they're going to bother answering.

Already, you can tell this is a lost cause. Queen doesn't sway, though. Ze just stands there and waits for an answer.

"Why?" says one of them, a yellow-haired sunshine with a jacket dappled in varying shades of green.

"Our cycle's out," says the Queen, and credit to zir where credit is due: zir voice is steady. "We had to walk a ways to get here."

You see two of the rats trade a look. Another one nudges one of their fellows, a crash queen with a black mohawk, and angles their head in your direction. All three of them sharpen up, like they've just noticed something.

You don't think you like how they look at you.

Two of them stand. Their stances are casual, open, but their hands are close to their guns. Another of their number already has theirs out, has it in hand.

"We can't help you," says the yellow-haired crash queen, but the words sound like they're meant to come across as a challenge. They've clearly got a car, after all. The refusal isn't one of necessity.

You'd really rather not force them to give something to you. You're outnumbered.

For the most part, the sense of union that binds together different factions in the Zones is a tenuous and tacit one. It's the same impulse that leads you and others to listening to the radio for direction, heeding the warnings of the voices on the air-freqs. For the most part, there is a unifying sort of purpose to those who wander the desert. There is a solidarity in being hated by the glittering white City on the horizon, in being something that BL/ind is so frantic and so desperate to stamp out. 

For the most part, you only have to worry about Better Living and the elements at large, jointly exerting a continuous effort to kill you.

You're not so stupid to assume that this mindset is by any means universal.

You see Queen watching the other two 'joys as they stand. It's not a clear display of hostility. Not yet. But it's fast approaching that point, and you can tell that ze's noticed. The option of pressing onward is no longer tenable. You see zir shift on the spot, minutely, leaning back on zir heels. Ready to run. More likely, ready to _move._

"That's fine," says Queen, evenly. There's a tension to zir frame. Ze wants to run - wants to reverse the trajectory of this entire conversation, walk away, but you both know better than to turn your backs on people you don't know. Ze knows to cut zir losses. "We should keep moving, then."

"Hm," says the killjoy in green, pitching the sound upward like they're about to correct a particularly glaring error. They seem to be the one in charge. "No. I don't think so."

The Queen _looks_ at them and zir eyes grow hard.

"Don't make this into something it doesn't have to be," ze says quietly, dropping all pretense. "We're just passing through, looking for gas."

"And I think I like your boots," says the 'joy in green. They stand lazily, rocking on their heels with one hand digging into their back pocket. The other rests at the gun at their hip, and they yank it out with a casual indolence. Like this is all part of a civil discussion. Like it's not the veiled threat that everyone knows it is.

"Don't," says the Queen again. "We can go our separate ways." Zir gun isn't out. Neither is yours. If either of you make a move for it, you know how this conversation will end.

Because you're outnumbered.

"I think I'll take that jacket of yours," says the Zone-rat with the mohawk. They're gesturing to you with the barrel of their raygun.

_"Métetelo por el culo,"_ the Queen snaps. "This isn't how it's supposed to be. We're all on the same _side."_

"The War's over, _gesuyarou,"_ says the killjoy in green, laughing. "We lost. It's every rat for themselves now. So." They nod to you both, smirking slightly. "Jacket. Hand it over."

"And any carbons you've got on you," says another of their crew, standing shoulder to shoulder with the rest. "We'll take those too."

For half a second, Queen looks to you, and you catch the wild desperation in zir eyes, the subtle widening that indicates that ze has _no plan_, no exit strategy for any of this. These sunshines will rob you simply because they can. They'll take supplies, protective gear. They'll take your guns, because they won't want you shooting at their backs. They'll take everything that defines you. They'll take all of it. Even once they have what they want, they will have no reason to stop. Not with you outnumbered, backs to the proverbial wall, and out here, stripping you of your equipment is a death sentence.

They have the upper hand and you don't. You raise your hands in seeming acquiescence, catch the Queen's mouth as it thins into a determined line, but one of the killjoys is already moving close. You hadn't been banking on them being so eager to liberate your belongings that they would forgo even a basic sense of caution, but it works to your advantage. The sunshine with the mohawk draws close, and then your arm is looped around their neck and you're dragging them down in a scuffle of dust and booted feet. They yelp, once, but don't get much further than that single broken syllable before you're sinking a fist into their mouth. Your knuckles scrape teeth.

You'd prefer to do this with your raygun. You can throw a decent hit and your height lends you an advantage, but it doesn't take long for the dust angel you're tangling with to clock you firmly across the jaw. Your sight goes starry. 

Here's the trade-off: you might be miserable at engaging with anyone in close quarters, but Fever Queen isn't. No one ever sees it coming, because no one expects the one-armed killjoy to pack any sort of punch.

A few bolts of light blitz into the sand at your feet. Are they really so stupid as to shoot at one of their own while they're locked in close quarters?

There's the beat of footfalls over sand. Queen makes a beeline for the two shooters. You glimpse zir kicking one of their legs in so they fold into a crouch. You don't see much else, because that's around the time that the motor-rat gets their fingers around your throat and starts to squeeze. Your reaction is reflexive and immediate, so you're more or less slamming a fist repeatedly into their ribs until finally they relinquish their grip. The 'joy _shoves_ you back several paces, stumbling away. They're trying to get some distance. 

They should have banked with trying to strangle you hand-to-hand. From a distance, you're unmatched.

You have less than a second to draw your weapon and shoot first. You draw, load them up with plasma until their guts are steaming grayish smoke. The center of mass is the biggest target and the easiest to hit, even with your ears ringing the way they are. You don't wait for them to hit the ground. You don't stop to consider that this was probably not meant to be a fight that ended with one of them dead. You're already moving toward the rest.

"Fuck 'em up!" the leader's bellowing, more or less cheering on their grounded companion as they claw against Queen. They don't seem keen on jumping in to their aid, probably because they don't expect the Queen to present very much of a threat. That's their second mistake. Their first one was in attempting to rob you.

There's no time to hesitate. If you stay where you are, you present a very politely unmoving target. You close in on the killjoy in green, breaking into a run for their position with your gun out. You don't think they expect you to go plunging straight for them, or they'd actually attempt to shoot you. 

They see you coming. They must have, because the motor-rat in green whips you across the face with the butt of their raygun, snapping your head back with the sheer force of the strike. Your immediate sights detonate into a flurry of hazing lights. You stagger, winded, giving their fellow rat the perfect opportunity to grab you. Their arms hook up around your shoulders, and they wrench you back and your gun drops into the dirt and by then it's over. You can't get free. You can't break their grip. You kick desperately, but it's not enough. The killjoy in green slams a knee between your legs, and then starts hitting you, over and over. They lay into you, fists slamming into your gut, into your sides, across your face. They sink one into your stomach and you retch, try to spit some of it over the killjoy's shoes. They hook you across the face in compensation. Your nose cracks and the resultant spike of agony blinds you for half a second. You feel yourself go cross-eyed. They hit you until something gives in you and your ribs light up in a bright snake of heat and fire.

You can't fight back. You're trying repeatedly to break the grip around your arms but it's not working, you have no leverage, and you can feel the blood running hot and coppery down your face. You don't know where the Queen is. These killjoys don't seem to want to kill you, which is maybe the worst part. They don't want to kill you. They just want to make you hurt for thinking you could fight back, for murdering one of their own.

The one holding you abruptly buckles and sinks to the ground when the Queen torches their brainstem in a pulse of hot yellow light. They take you with them and you drop. You're trying to get the dead weight of their arms off you, but you're coughing and every cough hurts. You glimpse the 'joy ze was just tussling with, their face a bloody wreck as they lie face-up. You can't tell if they're still breathing. The Queen has zir gun up and is ready to shoot but in the seconds it takes for zir first target to hit the ground the killjoy in green is charging for zir with a wounded cry of something that isn't English, and Fever Queen isn't about to fire and risk ghosting you in the crossfire. 

You can't take in the breath necessary to shout a warning, but you see it - the long slice of silver in the Zone-rat's hand.

You catch the blur, the glint of the blade catching the sunlight when they bring it up sharply.

You're down and you're unarmed and you don't have the time to react. It's reflex that carries you upright, even if you're staggering. You make it back to your feet, but the knife is already hilted just beneath the Queen's ribcage. The sound ze makes is little more than a strange, startled choking sound.

The killjoy in green digs the knife in further, _twisting_ it, their expression frozen in a contorted, pained snarl.

Your hand falls to your gun. It's still in the dust, and you're half-kneeling on the ground, one hand wrapped around your aching ribs. You open fire and you watch the killjoy's throat burst into a geyser of blood and smoke when your shot strikes true.

You don't stop shooting until the killjoy is a smoldering wreck on the ground.

You can't quite control your fall when you try to drop to Fever Queen's side, nearly end up landing on top of zir. Ze twitches, erratic, knuckles white around the handle of the knife that's buried itself in zir middle. Already, ze's bleeding, a wine-dark patch oozing wet and warm across zir stomach and pooling in the sand beneath zir. You see zir throat working as ze tries to get words out, but they're formless and jagged and you can't make sense of them. The urge to say something, to say _anything at all_ to zir before ze bleeds out is pressed up against your throat but you can't. Fever Queen is dying and you can't. Fever Queen has a knife in zir guts because ze wasn't about to watch you get beaten into a pulp and there's nothing you can do to change that.

Zir eyes are wide, the whites reddened and bright around zir dark irises. Ze can't get words out. Zir teeth are dark with blood.

"I'm sorry," is the most you can manage. The words are rusty and whispered, and the Queen shakes zir head fractionally. Ze lets go of the knife and zir hand is trembling when it reaches up to you, cups around the back of your neck and leaving a sticky handprint of zir own blood there.

Ze pulls you downward until your forehead is pressed up against zir own. Zir breath is rank with the iron tang of zir blood. Zir lips are moving, issuing vague sounds, but you can't parse any of them.

"I'm sorry," you say again, numbly, _stupidly._

Ze didn't want to die alone. Ze didn't want to, and ze's not. You're just certain that you're not _enough_ to assuage that fear and there's nothing you can do about that.

You can do nothing but stay there until the Queen's hand goes lax around the back of your neck and it slides down to the earth.

You close zir eyes, brush lips to zir forehead. You unhook zir mask from zir belt.

When you get back to the rest of the group, your clothes bloody and your ribs aching and your nose still broken and oozing red down your front, No one needs to ask why you're carrying the Queen's mask, and why ze isn't with you. Your bleeding face and uneven walk tell the full story. Devil's expression hardens and Raya angles her head away so that she's not looking at you. Only Titan seems capable of meeting your eyes.

You only shake your head.

You won't need the motorcycle anymore. There are only four of you now.

Raya asks you if you're okay, though it's obvious you're not. Titan asks you how badly you're hurt.

Devil tells you to get in the car, so you do.

You climb into the backseat of the car and close your eyes briefly against the lump in your throat. Then you see Titan offering to help clean the blood from your face, but you ignore it. You ignore the questions as to your well-being, whether you're injured to the point where you can't run, that your nose is still bleeding.

You wipe at your nose with the back of your hand, and are rewarded by the fuzzy pins-and-needles stinging that shoots out from the point where it must have been broken. You touch at the swelling skin gingerly, feel it hot and slick with your blood. It's running into your mouth. You can taste molten copper. 

You wipe at it again and shut your eyes.

You slide the Queen's mask into the next mailbox you see, and resist the urge to bruise your knuckles on the sun-polished metal again and again until the tight balloon in your lungs bursts.

****

**\--**

**yet vivid against our stockpiled silt  
you could follow me too -**

**\--**

Barely two months after you send Queen on zir way to the Witch, Raya blows up another BLi vending machine and this time you attract the attention of a couple dracs that turn out to have a scarecrow with them. The shootout quickly stops playing in your favor, and even Dust Devil isn't about to risk going up against a scarecrow's entourage when you're outnumbered, so you all pile into the car and the Devil starts driving.

You don't bank on the scarecrow being just as relentless in hunting you down as you all are in escaping it. But every time you think you're in the clear, it turns out you're not.

So now the acid rain's coming down in sheets. It turns the sand into a darkened sluice beneath the relentless downpour. It slicks the road and makes tires skid over worn asphalt. Visibility is low.

You duck a hail of drac laser fire. There's at least one car and three motorcycles in pursuit behind the four of you, as they have been for days now, and you're running low on gas. Raya was so certain that you'd lost them, but they'd started sharpening on the horizon as soon as the rain began in earnest, so now Dust Devil's redlining the engine. Raya struggles to put together something that might slow down your pursuers in spite of the weather while you and Titan try to keep them at bay with suppressing fire, but it's difficult. The rain makes it difficult. Even those pale outlines are blurred by the flood of fat, acid droplets from the sky, making it harder to hit anything with any degree of accuracy.

So none of you see the car coming at you from an angle, just oblique enough for you to glimpse it only when it erupts into your immediate sights to slam into the car with a rending shriek of metal on metal. It sends the entire thing spinning, crumpling the chassis on impact and flipping it onto its side. You get a flash-frame of the moment when it happens: Dust Devil flinching away from a faceful of broken glass, Raya looking up too late, Titan jerking around to reach for her. You get lucky with the angles of the collision and the fact that the impact sends you halfway out of the backseat so that you end up on the ground instead of in the crushed frame when it crashes into the mud. 

Then the world shuts out to the high, continuous drone of a muffled pitch drilled into your ears. It sounds like something croaking at you, harsh and nail-sharp. The blackness veiling your eyes is dark and feathery.

When your sight returns, everything's fuzzy, and not simply because the rain is still pounding relentlessly downward. At once, you try to move. As if your brain was awaiting that specific signal, everything tides back to you in a rush. Your nerves feel flayed, pulsing white-hot as your body dedicates every sluggish, pained heave of your heart to informing you that you're hurt. You're hurt, and it's bad. Your rib cage feels like a crushed soda can, your lungs pinching with the effort to keep you breathing.

You can't move. You're splayed facedown in the dirt and you can't move. You can see the rain unwinding long, curling lines of red down one arm. You're bleeding. You can't tell from where, but you're bleeding. It feels like it's from everywhere but you _can't tell_ and you can't even angle your neck to get a better look at the damage. You can feel water and heat running into your eyes. You blink away the trails of your own blood, try to squint through it.

The car is ahead of you. You can barely make it out without lifting your head. It's on one side, belching smoke from the hood, which has been accordioned into little more than a pleated, twisted chunk of scrap. A thick crust of mud clings to the underside of the wheels, still spinning halfheartedly in the air. 

You need to move.

You can't.

You _need_ to move.

The sound of the rain isn't enough to drown out the hissing steam, the gasping motor. The crescendo of several engines drawing closer.

You gasp, and the act of drawing breath is painful in a way that's suggestive of broken ribs.

You can't see anyone else.

The car is on its side.

You can't move.

You _need_ to move.

You _can't._

The sound of engines is getting closer. The car is on its side, still bleeding smoke out into the rain-rinsed air. If you squint, you think you can see a hand - 

Someone's moving.

Someone pitches out of the wreck, rolls out from it. You can tell by the sheer volume and breadth of the silhouette that it's Titan. They're trying to stagger to their feet, their hair long and plastered to their face and the back of their neck. They can't quite make it. Their eyes are unfocused. One side of their face is almost completely drenched in scarlet. It mats their hair, runs down their chin and their neck and stains their shirtfront. A dark patch is spreading just over their knee. Their knee that - it's at an awkward angle. They're trying to crawl out of the wreck but their leg is dragging behind them. Crawling looks _painful._

You see them lock eyes with you. You can't move, but Titan's lips press tightly together as they dig one hand into the sand and slowly, excruciatingly, begin to drag themself toward you, their mangled leg dragging uselessly behind them.

The roar of engines in your ears is thunderous, drowning out all else. The motorbikes kick up sprays of wet sand and silt when they brake, roughly, and behind them there's the slam of a car door.

You need to move. You _can't move_ but you need to. Every part of you is screaming to get _up_, but when faced with instruction, your body only locks itself into numbness. The only parts of you that aren't numb are the parts that hurt. Your skin feels icy underneath the rush of rain from the sky, bullet-like droplets that pelt you viciously where you lie, but everything else feels too hot, like needles prickling beneath your skin.

The draculoids look out of place, their white suits spattered with mud. Worse is the lean, gray shape that cuts through them. It doesn't wear a mask. The cut of its clothing is unfamiliar. The sharp lines of its face are difficult to make out in the rain, but you can pick out that it has one: bald, and disconcertingly human. It's not wearing a helmet. There's no question as to what it is.

The scarecrow strides through the wreckage and the rain.

Titan tries to stand, makes a grab for their weapon, tries to make a break for it even with their ruined leg.

The scarecrow plants a foot against their spine and shoves them into the mud and shoots them three times in the back of the head.

You don't have the lung capacity to scream, or do much else. Your shuddering heart clenches agonizingly in your chest.

The scarecrow looks out at the wreck.

"Bag this one up for extraction." Its voice is cold, utilitarian, utterly devoid of inflection. You can see it pointing at you. "Leave the rest."

_Bag this one_ \- what does that mean? _For extraction._ You're certain you don't want to find out. You feel your heart speed up, pounding more blood through your ears and into the burning cavities of your body that have been knocked askew. It feels like most of you is filling with blood. You can't tell. Your ribs ache with the effort of continuing to breathe, like the broken bones are pressing up against the bellows of your lungs.

A pair of hands flip you onto your back and your vision whites out. It's still white when everything fades back into view - primarily because there's a draculoid looming over you. You try to hold still, try not to so much as _breathe,_ do _everything possible_ not to alert it to the fact that you are _still alive_ and still _conscious_ for whatever it's planning to do to you.

There's the buzz of a zipper as the opening of a bodybag, unmistakable, starts to close over your head. Then the draculoid's dark eyes and white face vanish as you're partitioned away from the rest of the world.

You can feel your pulse, thready and erratic, because your heart is juddering furiously in your chest.

You can't see. It's dark, the lights gone out.

Your blood's thundering in your ears. Your breath is ragged, and the air is too thick and sweltering.

For half a second, you hear it - a rusted shriek that sounds like the shrill of tearing steel, or maybe a crow's scream.

You can't breathe.

You can't _breathe_.

You can't - 

When you wake, it's still dark, but astonishingly warm. Your fingers and toes aren't numb anymore, but now you can feel the pain emanating from the crushed part of your abdomen, relentless and coal-hot. You reach up to grope at the injury, to try and assess it, but your hands catch the material above your head instead, and you remember where you are and the last thing you saw before the world became closed to you.

You scrabble at the inside of the bodybag, ignoring the bone-white electricity uncurling from your chest and your ribs, ignoring the way you swear you can feel things _moving_ underneath your skin when they really, really shouldn't, until your hands find the tiny opening at the top and you scratch and claw at it. It doesn't matter if it hurts. It doesn't matter that, when you finally get the zipper to start inching down, the heat starts leaking out of the bag immediately. 

The pounding rain has diminished to a cloudy drizzle. You can feel yourself gasp when the wet air hits you with all the density and potency of a cold slap. Fighting your way out of the web of carbon-plastic composite starts to renew the agony in each limb, until you can feel every bruise and hairline fracture. Your chest is a pulsing, white-hot pillar of pain that _does not stop_ even when you lie still and wait for it to ease. It reduces everything to static. It dims your vision into a grayed-out slurry. It buzzes high tones into your ears and cuts out all sensation but the ache in your middle that has stopped being an ache, has stopped being anything but an omnipresent foundation of your existence. It's not going away anytime soon so you make it your fulcrum, concentrating on _that_ and nothing else until the hot bleed in your guts is all-consuming. Pain means that you're still alive, so it means you can't keep lying here neatly packaged up for BL/ind to scrape you out from the dirt.

You get up.

Each breath aches. There's a wet friction of your ribs against the soft, fragile parts of you, and you can feel it with every labored wheeze.

You stand there, swaying, and blink the rainwater from your eyes.

The dracs and the scarecrow are gone and the smoke has stopped oozing from under the hood of the car, but everything else is exactly as it was. 

They bagged you up.

They had you prepped for "extraction."

They must not have expected you to be capable of moving. Maybe they assumed you were dead, or that you were so battered and broken that you wouldn't be able to move. Whatever the case, they were fully prepared to _keep_ you hermetically sealed for some unknown, abstract purpose you don't want to put any additional thought to. 

The same couldn't be said for the rest of your crew. Titan is facedown, the back of their head blackened with raygun blasts. You limp past with your teeth clenched and, when that's insufficient, biting into the wall of your cheek to keep from crying out. You get close enough to peer into the remains of the car, what's left of the front seat.

The scarecrow had said to leave the rest. 

You can see why.

The collision looks like it shattered most of the bones in Raya's upper body. The parts of her not black with blood hang in unnatural arcs and hard angles. Most of Dust Devil's head has been pulped inward, a glistening slice of skull and brain matter exposed to the elements.

You and Titan were the most intact.

As much as you'd prefer not to have to look at any of it, you still force yourself to hobble forward, reach through the jagged shards of broken glass from the splintered windshield so you can feel for Devil's mask, and then for Raya's. The act is beyond excruciating. It's hard to think through it. You think that, for a moment, you stop breathing. A hesitant shuffle forward sends a bright jag of heat spiraling up the column of your spine and your hand jerks reflexively, carving a fresh gash into the back of your hand from the protruding glass. 

When you finally withdraw with both masks dangling from your hand, the continuous tone has once again nestled in your ears. You look down, and Devil's sunglasses are lying askew on their lap, bizarrely intact. You pick them from the wreckage for no other reason besides the fact that you have nothing else left. The backseat has been caved in on one side, but not entirely. Titan survived because they were in the back, and on the floor lies the radio that used to belong to Haywire.

You can't afford to travel blind, so you fish it out, even if stretching in with one arm to retrieve it again compresses the cage of your chest painfully, until you can barely breathe.

Your body's starting to acclimate to the cooler temperature; you're shivering. The slick of rain is cool and laminar against your skin, and does nothing to detract from the steady, unrelenting pulse of pulverized nerve ends and broken bone clenched in your chest.

You're not done, though. You drop into a crouch beside Titan next, gasp aloud when the act ignites another bright coil of red from inside you.

Now you have three masks and no car and nothing else. You have a pair of aviators and an old radio and the certainty that, at some point, BL/ind will attempt to return for you. You need to get out of here before they do.

You can't run like this. 

You're not about to let that stop you.

You leave behind the smoldering wreck, and you start to walk. You walk even if every step _hurts._ You walk despite the pain in your ribs, the ache in your chest that has nothing to do with what parts of you have been crushed and bruised and damaged. You walk because you are the only one left, _again,_ and if you can do nothing else right you can carry the souls of your friends to their final resting place.

You can do it. You have to do it.

You've done it before.

That's twice now that BL/ind's tried to bury you.

They still don't understand the futility of trying to bury a seed.

****

**\--**

**be the bull in red for me  
the bluish rip current  
wheeling into reach**

**\--**

This time, you're not dehydrated or exhausted to the point of passing out when you finally slide a trio of masks into a mailbox, one after another, weeks later. You're just tired, and you lean against the metal and close your eyes for a moment even if it's scalding. It doesn't really matter how much it hurts. The pain in your ribs has receded to a raw, substernal, omnipresent ache that now only worsens whenever you break into anything faster than a slow walk.

You could stay here for as long as you need to, technically. You could finish what you started, the first time you nearly broke yourself in an effort to get someone's soul to a mailbox. How long ago was it, now?

Years, probably. You can't say.

There's no real impetus for you to get up and keep going at this point. So you sit with your back against the mailbox for a few minutes, breathing through the worst of the pain that's still working its way up through your chest. You slip on Devil's aviators, purely because you're tired of carrying them, and try once again to get Haywire's radio to start working like you have been for days now. Some of the acid rainwater must have gotten into its wiring, because you haven't been able to get it to play anything but the odd fit of choppy static since you rescued it from the car's crumpled backseat.

Destroya has chosen to favor you today, though. This time, you actually get a station. It sounds pretty awful, the words cutting in and out, but at least you can actually hear them.

_" - any tumbleweeds out there in need of an extra push,"_ drawls a DJ whose voice you think you've heard before. You frown, trying to pick out where, in the cemetery of voices and names that now live inside your head, you've heard it. _"We've got a brand new LP for all of you, and the Mad Gear and Missile Kid have chosen to premiere it via yours truly."_

Mad Gear.

How long has it been since you've heard those tones?

You lean back and breathe out. The pain is easing. It'll get better eventually. You need a minute, but it'll get better eventually.

_"This is Dr. Death Defying, reminding you to keep running and to always keep the wind at your back."_ The words segue artlessly into the pound of a bass drum, rapid-fire and unceasing. You let the music unspool a ribbon of green into your head for a few minutes before it occurs to you that you've heard that name before.

Dr. Death Defying got out of a jeep and shot a couple of dracs who had you pinned before they could ghost the four of you. You, along with three other souls you couldn't save.

How long ago was _that?_

It feels as impossible to quantify as everything else. You mark the passage of time in terms of what manages to almost kill you, and what ends up killing everyone else. You're two ghosted crews old. You're nine dead friends into this life. You're as old as it takes for someone to have weathered innumerable laser blasts, a broken nose, several cases of fractured ribs, infection, exhaustion, dehydration, and recurrent near-death.

Mad Gear is screaming, guttural and uninterpretable, into the microphone. It's impossible to tell if the static froth that cuts intermittently across the cascade of sound is an intentional, artistic choice, or a result of a bad signal.

Either way, you suppose you have to credit Dr. Death Defying, once again, for saving your life, even if this time he doesn't know it. Him, and one other.

You dig from your pocket a flat, vaguely rectangular hunk of scrap metal, liberated from the wreck that almost killed you. You wince at the clenching of the muscles in your chest when you scratch the familiar, sprawling word into the flaking paint with the edge of a carbon, but you scrape at it until it's outlined clearly against the glinting metal. It doesn't take long to plant it in the sand.

_It's a cruel and low sort of person that doesn't thank their patron._ You don't know if Destroya counts as your patron anymore, if you count as a satellite chaser when by now you think you've done more shooting and killing and running and hiding than you have hunting for scrap, but you probably owe it regardless, which means you should at least make a baseline effort to keep living.

You get back up. You sway unevenly on the spot, and shade your eyes against the sun's merciless glare. Once night falls, you would ordinarily be able to get a better idea of your position from the arrangement of the stars in the sky, but last you checked you were in Zone Two, where the smog and cloud cover is too thick to discern them, so that's not a sure thing. The bottom line is that if you keep moving you're bound to hit a sign of civilization eventually. Either that, or you'll walk until you drop dead from dehydration and heat exhaustion.

You find that you're not fussed about which comes first.

Days drag past without incident, as if the Witch looked at the trail of bodies left in the wake of your presence and decided to take pity on you. You have your jacket to shield you from the worst of the shower of radiation from on high, and you have a dead scarecrow's helmet that filters out the worst of the fumes from the acid rain or the limeade that BL/ind sends boiling out into the atmosphere from the City. You have a pair of sunglasses to blot out the sun's unrelenting glare when it gets too hard to breathe through your helmet. You have a radio, and a gun, and you have the knowledge of how to survive when the rest of the world wants you to shut down and die. You have two loops of bad luck beads, and you can no longer tell if it's good fortune or bad that has allowed you to last for as long as you have, despite how often you shouldn't have.

Most days, all you have for guidance is a radio. You walk until you can't walk anymore and when you can't walk anymore you find a place to sit down and wait out the night. You have the means to keep going for as long as you need to, though you're not clear on where it is you're meant to end up. Maybe the very edge of Zone Six. Maybe you can walk into Zone Seven and go looking for the desiccated husks of two of those dead friends that still hang over your head, and see how long it takes for the radiation to kill you.

Persistence is pathological. It's instinctive. You no longer consider whether vengeance motivates you, assuming it ever did. Perhaps now it's more akin to instinct. An object in motion stays in motion, maybe indefinitely.

You save yourself, and you will continue to save yourself.

You cannot help it.

The world seems so very keen to finish you, but you've proven to be preternaturally talented at living in spite of it. Perhaps it's too much to hope that, eventually, you'll be able to go out on your own terms.

The idleness of the thought should probably scare you. It happens so calmly, so easily, that it _does_ cause you to stop and contemplate that it's probably not the sort of thing that one should be thinking when one has devoted most of their energy to staying _alive_ in the face of unrelenting adversity.

You let the weight of it settle over your heart. You gauge the way it nestles in your soul, and whether or not it disturbs you. More and more often, you pick up your raygun with its flaking blue paint and thumb the trigger absently. You've been shot enough times to know that it would hurt, but you are nothing if not accustomed to pain. There is nothing in this world as painless as death, just as there is nothing as deathless as pain.

Would the Witch think less of you for it? If you were to make the hike to one of Her mailboxes so you could die beside it, and hope that some wandering crew would take the final step and slot you away into Her keeping?

It is during moments like these that you're forced to confront the reality of solitude and its unsettling hold over you. Without the chatter of other voices around you, the milling of other souls pressing close against yours, you're left with little besides the unpleasant architecture of your own thoughts. Considerations as to the seemingly infinite failings that have kept you anchored to this life while so many others have passed on. You could choose to believe that there is a reason that you have endured when everyone around you has not - that there is a reason behind the hoarse, harsh cawing noises that you have twice heard in the event horizon of certain instances that should have killed you. You heard the flutter of raven wings and the clatter of talons in Gertie's orphanage and you heard them after the car, and for the first time you wonder why it is that Better Living calls them _scarecrows._ They don't banish death. They usher it. But perhaps they banish a particular _kind_ of death.

The assumption that either BL/ind naming conventions or your long stretch of shit luck has anything to do with the Witch seems like a stretch. It feels discourteous to place that level of weight upon your own life, when you have never once done anything of any real substance with it. You have not dismantled megacorporations, you have not sparked rebellions, you did not fight in Wars or face down white armies on the frontlines. You have done nothing but get other people killed.

By all accounts, you really should have died.

But then you lived, and they didn't, and now you're alone. 

It's because you're alone that you make an easy target for a couple of waveheads who take advantage of how you're trekking about on foot, so they shoot you in the leg to keep you from running and they beat the shit out of you. When you struggle, they kick you hard enough to jar your still-healing ribs and one of them cuts you across the face and once that happens you're too busy lying there, frozen, remembering how easily the blade slid into Fever Queen's flesh, to fight back any further.

The waveheads promptly take every carbon you have. They leave you your helmet and jacket, though, which would have probably fetched more c's than whatever dregs they cribbed from your pockets. For hours you just lie there, clutching your ribs and groaning. It's for the best that you think that some of them might still be broken, and that it hurts to breathe. Otherwise, you think you might have just lain there forever, laughing and laughing at the odds.

****

**\--**

**for you  
i'll be that still god  
i'll be your vital clearing**

**\--**

You're roughly two months out from failing to prevent the slide of wheels over sand and the cataclysmic impact that murdered two of your friends and facilitated the murder of a third, roughly three weeks from when you were termed an easy target by waveheads with nothing better to do than threaten passing zonehoppers, and you're starting to become progressively less disturbed over the prospect of finding a mailbox to shortcut your way to a more peaceful state of being. A _better living_, the part of your brain vaguely delirious from the heat supplies, and again, you almost want to laugh aloud at that. You don't, though, because there's a car humming through the shimmering heatwaves and it looks to be changing course to head straight for you.

Even from a distance, it's apparent that it's not Better Living. It's got too much color splashed across its front and sides for that. That doesn't mean you're safe by any means, though at this point you're not sure that really matters. You stop walking and draw your gun with a weary resignation as you let the car pull up beside you.

The driver leans out of the rolled-down window. Their hair is a violent, eye-searing shade of red, and their eyes are veiled behind a pair of dark glasses. You glimpse two others in the car with them, mostly keeping quiet.

"Hey," the sunshine drawls, almost lazily. "Headin' anywhere?"

You try and fail to prevent the violent flash of memory that threatens to invade your thoughts - Haywire, grinning pink and clamoring into the backseat at Dust Devil's invitation - 

You're too tired to say anything, so you shake your head.

These killjoys don't seem interested in robbing you or shooting you. If that's the case, it'd probably be best for everyone if they just moved on. Something about that influx of memory must show on your face, though, because the red-haired crash kid is still looking at you.

"Y'sure?"

You open your mouth to answer. Cough slightly, because it's been so long since you've needed to speak, and you don't want to assume any of them know sign language.

"Nowhere I need to be," you say. The words rasp. You can feel the killjoy's eyes on you and something about their gaze is - hard to take. They look at you over the tops of their sunglasses and their eyes are pale and intolerable and they're not even blinking as they regard you with a faint frown pinching their brow, like they know what you're thinking.

You look away. At some point, your fingers started tightening around the grip of your raygun.

"I'm thinkin' maybe you dunno where you're going yet," says the killjoy, finally. "Don't mean you won't figure it out when you get there."

What are you supposed to say to that, to the offer they've left implicit? They're not wrong - you don't have anywhere you need to _be_ and you certainly don't have any idea of where you're going. You don't know where they're going, either, but here they are offering to make room for one more troubled soul and you don't have the words to tell them what a miserable, incalculably horrible idea that is. You don't have the words to tell them that you've got more ghosts lengthening your shadow than you can take, and you cannot, _will not_ fathom the possibility of adding three more to that body count. That you are tired of being responsible for the deaths of your friends and, perhaps more broadly, that you're _tired_ just in general and you're about ready to walk out into Zone Seven and let the ambient ionization in that irradiated wasteland kill you.

You start to shake your head.

Then the window to the backseat abruptly cranks down, and someone else leans out of it. They're grinning at you, their dark hair an unruly tangle falling in waves down their shoulders and in front of their face.

"Hey, asshole," says the killjoy in the backseat. "Hate to interrupt here, but you wanna wait on fillin' your head with lightning for a minute? I got this pack of Jump Juice here. Where's it - _aw, where the fuck - "_ Their head disappears for a minute. Then it pops out again, and this time they're holding a bright green can aloft. "Look at this shit! Free six-pack."

You stare at them.

The killjoy jiggles the can at you in what's clearly meant to be an enticing manner.

"I think it's all gone flat. Cannot fuckin' _stand_ flat soda. I need some chucklefuck to taste test this shit, and Kobra won't help me and Poison won't drink shitty bootleg soda while they're driving, so you're _it."_

You stare at them.

The killjoy levers the can open with a metallic _crack_ and the fizz of liberated pressure.

They're still grinning.

It's not often that you have no idea how to react.

"C'_mooooon,"_ says the killjoy, dragging out the word. "Y'know you wanna. Y'know you wanna taste some of this. Hold off on fucking off and dyin' until you've done me a quick favor, yeah?"

Something spools up in your chest, like a dead motor sparked back to life. You can't say what it is, any of it. Maybe it's how flippant the other 'joy is about the thought of loading your brain up with plasma, like it's an option they've considered and discarded in the past. Maybe it's the reminder of powering down cans of soda, flat and slightly warm, beneath the murky spread of stars. Maybe it's the intensity of the driver's eyes on you, and the way that they're somehow impossible to look at, even if the sympathy that must be there is almost completely veiled.

Maybe it's the way it was phrased. No matter how inconsequential, it was voiced as something that was _needed._ They need someone to do this.

They need you to do this small, stupid thing.

For the first time in months, there's a bubble of something swelling in your chest that stops you dead because it takes you a minute to recognize it as laughter, because it has been _so unfathomably fucking long_ since you've felt like laughing at anything that you can no longer tell if the impulse is genuine or some warped, deranged instinct.

You don't laugh. You don't even smile, though there's an almost imperceptible twitch to the corner of your mouth. You're not sure anyone has noticed, save for the driver.

There's a tightness in your chest and in your throat. You can't answer the killjoy aloud, even if you wanted to.

Your hand falls on the handle of the door to the backseat. The paint is hot, almost searing. It feels like it would burn away your fingerprints if you still had fingerprints to lose.

The door's unlocked. It opens easily when you tug it open.

The killjoy with the soda shuffles back. Sure enough, there's a six-pack of soda cans balanced on their lap, though now it's more like a five-pack.

They hold the can out to you, and you take it.

"Welcome aboard," says the killjoy. Their smile isn't the same winning arc of white as Dust Devil's. It's slightly yellowed, uneven, skewed by irony and who knows what else. Nonetheless, it somehow manages to communicate something approaching sincerity.

You get in the car.

****

**\--**

**my palms your beacon in the exodus  
your vision mine in what comes next**

**\--**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A few quick endnotes as well:
> 
> 1\. You may recognize a few more references throughout this chapter. The line breaks feature two poems. The first is entitled "of all the dark and wild places (modern prophets, pt. 1)," by E.C. The second is "Substitute for the Still God" by Amrita Chakraborty. The title of this fic and a handful of lines sprinkled throughout, including the title of this chapter, can be sourced to paraphrased quotes from one of my favorite lyricists of all time, the forever distinctive Pete Wentz. A paraphrased Mexican proverb makes its appearance in this chapter, though the source of the saying is to my knowledge unknown. This chapter also contains an allusion to the poem "Bee in a Jar" by Molly Brodak. Lastly, this chapter contains a line from the Andrew Bird song "A nervous tic motion of the head to the left." Multiple names and characters are my own design, with the exception of the bit character "Overload," who I mentioned last chapter as being a shoutout to the 2010 Gorillaz album Plastic Beach, specifically the song "Stylo."
> 
> 2\. Again, apologies for any fluent speakers of Spanish or Japanese. I did my best, but I am not a native speaker of either of those beautiful languages. Please feel free to correct any glaring errors.
> 
> 3\. Once again, I drew up some reference sheets for the more prominent of these side characters, mostly for my own reference so I could keep them consistent. If anyone out there is curious, they are as follows: [Dust Devil](https://i.imgur.com/aZybDVi.png), [Fever Queen](https://i.imgur.com/F2Qpqxd.png), [Haywire](https://i.imgur.com/79Yxxgg.png), [100% Titanium](https://i.imgur.com/QkSCiV9.png), and [Mantarraya](https://i.imgur.com/fGxJp4z.png).
> 
> I didn't set out with the intention to post the first chapter of this piece when the MCR news was announced and the second chapter the day of the show itself, but that's just kind of how it happened. Who am I to fight something like that?


	3. death is a circle that keeps closing in on all my friends

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> At last, the final part of this trilogy. It is my hope that you find it satisfying, even if it definitely ran for longer than I planned it to.
> 
> You may assume that many of the warnings at the start of this work will remain in full effect.
> 
> Specific to this chapter, please be aware that there are some mentions and discussions of suicide ideation. There are a few scenes in this chapter that feature medical procedures such as a blood transfusion and the application of stitches, none of which are performed very well or very hygienically. A few characters who are implied to be underage do some drinking and smoking, and there are a couple scenes of descriptive eye trauma. At one point, a character undergoes a panic attack and briefly employs self-harm as a means of maladaptive coping.
> 
> There is also a brief mention of unsafe binding practices, which I do not condone. I cannot stress enough that one should always, _always_ bind safely, and should _never_ use tape or bandages.

****

**\--**

**he's a lonely planet  
don't stir and wake**

**\--**

Of the three of them, you think the Ghoul makes the most sense to you at first. It might be his volume, his humor, his irreverence, or any combination of the three, but it's impossible to say. It would be easier to grasp why his blasé irreverence appeals to you were any of it more straightforwardly redolent of someone else. It's not. There are kernels of his delivery that remind you distantly of Devil's casual insincerity, of Haywire's refusal to give a fuck, of Coma's loud and irregular laughter. But, for the most part, you think that he just catches you off guard more than anyone you've ever met. He's capable of startling the odd huff of amusement from you, even a skewed partial smirk. He grins triumphant whenever he succeeds, like it's a personal goal of his to see you crack a smile as often as possible. Maybe it is.

Whatever it is, it's new.

The day that car stops for you is the day that your life diverts into an entirely new trajectory, and this should have been apparent from the start when it was a cracked-open can of old soda - which _did,_ in fact, turn out to be flat - and a few glib remarks that prompt you to climb into the backseat of an unfamiliar car instead of fucking off and filling your head with plasma. This should have been apparent when you sit down beside the killjoy who made the offer, and he introduces himself as _Fun Ghoul_ and says that if you could hurry the fuck up and tell him whether or not that soda is flat that would be great, okay, motherfucker?

When you inform him that the soda is regrettably devoid of fizz, the Ghoul proceeds to make a face before immediately snapping open a can of his own anyway and then downing it all in one long swallow.

The act is so transparent that it stuns you for a moment. He doesn't bother to uphold the false pretense he used to get you into the car - doesn't even acknowledge it. He burps long and loud until the killjoy in the passenger seat tells Ghoul to fuck off with a sort of weary exasperation, though there's no bite to it.

"Hey. Hey. Fuckface." It takes you a moment to register that Ghoul's talking to you. "Yeah. _You,_ shitlips. You gotta name or something? 'Cause if you don't, I'm just gonna call you 'Fuckface'."

"No, you're not," says the killjoy in the passenger seat, without missing a beat or looking back. "We are not calling 'em 'Fuckface'."

"Speak for yourself, Fuckface," says Ghoul, with a sort of wicked affection. Then he's not looking at the killjoy in the passenger seat. He's looking at you, expectantly.

Your throat is less parched and your lips are less chapped now that you have sugar and caffeine in your veins and some trace hydration in your system, so it's easier to answer than it would be otherwise.

"Jet Star."

Ghoul crinkles up his empty can and drops it to his feet, and then immediately claims another, cracking it open.

"Fuck yeah," he says, and downs the entire thing.

He spends the rest of the hour burping loudly until the 'joy in the front seat complains and then Ghoul leans forward and belches even louder in his ear.

Fun Ghoul has long, straggling black hair that runs like oil down his olive-skinned face and a tendency to laugh at things that probably aren't meant to be all that funny. He's spattered with ink that's laid into his skin in myriad patterns, freckling his knuckles and splashed along the backs of his hands, and when he speaks you think of acid green streaked with gold. He's easily the shortest of the three and you think he might also be the youngest, but it's hard to say. No one has a discernible age out here. Violence and blood and radiation and plasma fumes carve immeasurable years into everyone's skin. Kids fighting other kids. Clawing for the same tired scraps. The revolutionaries get younger and younger, and children keep on dying. You certainly buried enough of them back at Gertie's.

The killjoy in the passenger seat, you learn, is a starshine called the Kobra Kid. He has narrow eyes, hair too fair to be natural, a deadpan disposition, and a generally locked expression that makes him difficult to read. He's not as quiet as you are, but he doesn't tend to speak up unless there's a good reason for it or if someone else says something first, and when he does it's usually heavy with sarcasm. He and Ghoul have a tangible rapport; they're the only two who, for several hours at a time, do any of the talking in the car. 

The driver is a luneshine who goes by Party Poison, a name that suits the radioactive red of their dyed hair, and they don't do very much talking at all to start with. They do, on occasion, lock eyes with you from the rearview mirror. Their gaze isn't any easier to take when distilled through a mirror than it is face to face so you quickly look away. There's something about the arrangement of their features and the shape of their eyes that strikes you as vaguely familiar, though they feel slightly out of place in the roughness of the Zones. Possibly it's because their bone structure is fair and bizarrely delicate, even with their skin marred with sunburn and dust.

You're trying not to think too hard about any of them. It's difficult when you're all sat so close together.

You don't know how long you've been running, is the thing. You have rough estimates, vague approximations of how time has passed and how long it's been since the crash damaged your ribs and how long it's been since a pair of waveheads re-damaged them, but mostly you have to gauge it based on how badly the various and disparate parts of you still hurt. Exhaustion is a sustained and unrelenting thing and it's been ripping you apart for weeks now, wrenching you out of sleep mere hours in and jerking you awake with the remembered sensation of a laser blast or a crumpled dashboard or a BL/ind bodybag or any other number of the horrifying and inescapable things that you do your best not to think about in your waking hours. It's because you don't think about them when you're awake unless you have to, unless you are, as an example, running for your life from one of those things, that you know they still have power over you. But if you devote any further thought to them then they will besiege you when you're awake too, and you get that enough from reality without adding unfounded and hypothetical terror to that list.

The point is that you drift off periodically without meaning to. Your head lists against the window and your eyes grow heavy and for half a moment your heart will slow -

Until the tires hit a bump in the road or the car has to make a sharp turn and you wrench in your seat, your heart jackknifing hard beneath your ribs and your eyes going wide and blown out.

You jolt awake for what might be the fifth time or might be the tenth, and then Ghoul is leaning close, so close that he's almost touching you. The untidy trails of his hair fall forward and spill onto your shoulder when he says, quietly:

"You doin' all right there, thrill killer?"

Nodding is an automatic response. Ghoul looks, in a word, skeptical.

"You can conk out for a few hours if y'want," he says.

"Lie down or somethin'," says Kobra, without missing a beat. Like he's been listening the whole time. You hadn't realized he could hear or was even aware of the conversation.

"Yeah. _Yeah,"_ says Ghoul, eyes lighting up. "I can get in the trunk and you can take the backseat."

You stare at Ghoul.

"No one," says Poison from the driver's seat, drawing the word out lazily, "is getting in the trunk. Unless they gotta _reason_ for it."

"Lettin' Jet here sleep _is_ a reason," says Ghoul.

"If you want us to shove you in the trunk you can just _ask_, Ghoul," says the Kobra Kid. His words feel rich and amber-colored to you, shot through with a reddish luster.

You glance away, focus on the scenery visible through the window and the desert landscape as it goes unraveling past, tuning out the words and the easy bickering that flows between all three parties. They stopped for you. All three of them have made and continue to make these small concessions on your behalf, choices to pull over and share their soda and invite you into conversation. All this makes them is three more souls that you earnestly do not want to watch die the same way you've watched everyone else.

They don't appear to have been motivated by pragmatism. Whatever instinct prompted Poison to pull over or Ghoul to offer his Juice or Kobra to give a damn, it wasn't out of some desire for another pair of hands or another pair of legs or if it was, it isn't any sort of gain that's _obvious_ to you. None of them have asked anything of you, save for Ghoul, who you're now ninety-five percent sure was bullshitting you so that you would get into the goddamned car in the first place.

You shouldn't be stuck on the _why_ the way you are but sure enough, that's what's happening. People out here don't help you for no reason, because otherwise there would not be killjoys like Dust Devil and there would not be people like Tommy Chow Mein. Even Gravel Gertie had required that you earn your keep in some empirical fashion and that's what you had done, by digging graves and stitching bandages and cleaning out fried laser-burns. Hot Chimp had asked nothing of you, but she's a DJ, and there's something of that expectation that DJs are the voices of the Zones and she had said herself that it's what they _do._ They guide people home.

The bottom line is that they must want something from you. They must want something from you as a collective or as individuals but the problem is that Ghoul had _said_ he wanted something from you and it was that you drink his _refresco_ and tell him if it was flat and even that had proven to be more or less a pointless ploy to - what? To get you in the car, ostensibly, but now that you're _in_ the car where it would be easier to interrogate you, to rob you, to recruit you, to do anything they wanted while you're stuck there with them. None of them have done anything but surround you with their idle conversation and occasionally ask you if you're all right and just...generally do things that people out here don't, in principle, tend to do unless there's some sort of ulterior motive. You're not one of them. You don't know them. You've never seen any of them before in your life. But something must have prompted them to stop and something must have prompted them to offer you a ride to wherever you needed to go, even if you don't know where you're going yet or if you're going anywhere at all.

It's getting harder to swallow for some indiscernible reason. There's a pressure around your throat that doesn't ease.

It's possible that they stopped for you because of a very simple purpose, but it doesn't seem plausible to contend that they might have stopped for you on the basic premise of feeling _bad_ for you. Again, you've lived in the desert for your entire life and there is a general give and take of things and that simply isn't one of the foundations of how people operate out here. Everyone feels _bad_ when they're caught beneath a constant shower of overhead radiation. Everyone feels bad because they're constantly running and fighting and dying at the hands of a megacorporation that owns virtually everything, and when they're not being poisoned by clouds of toxic vapors or getting run over by scarecrows or getting murdered by draculoids or getting turned _into_ draculoids then they're furthering their own extinction on the sidelines by getting into pointless fights with one another that end with yet more of them dead.

You may have walked into an exception. By chance, or by fate, or because the Witch or Destroya or both had an eye out for you. You'd prefer not to dwell on the possibility that something so much greater than you has had its eyes on you, primarily because it's simultaneously both unnerving _and_ far more than one half-dead Zone-rat like you frankly deserves.

It's getting harder to think and to repeatedly loop around justifying and not justifying things to yourself. Your eyelids are drifting down again until the blur of conversation around you sharpens in such a way that indicates you're being addressed.

" - findin' someplace to sleep that ain't the _car,"_ Poison's saying, "'cause I dunno about the _rest_ of you, but I don't feel like sleepin' in the Trans Am tonight. Space is cramped enough without there bein' four of us. That cool with you, Jet?"

"That _cool your jets?"_ says Ghoul, though the words don't seem to be directed at anyone in particular. He's snickering into his last can of Jump Juice. Laughing at his own joke.

The problem is that you're not sure why they're asking you. Like you said, you're not one of them. You're a stranger that they picked up for reasons that you can't currently explain, and that might be a failure in the scope of your imagination or it might be simple the fact that you are, at the end of the day, _very fucking tired_ and keeping your thoughts on linear paths is proving to be very fucking difficult.

Nonetheless, Poison is clearly waiting for an answer, and you nod because you can't think of anything else to do.

Their eyes meet yours.

Again, the complete and unfiltered power of their gaze proves - difficult to look at. Their eyes are pale, brownish, maybe hazel, and they're _unblinking_ as they look at you like they're expecting an answer, as though your opinion or your judgement _matters_ in some tangible way. It's hard to bear. It's hard to bear because you feel like they're picking up on parts of you that you're unaccustomed to shielding from others.

They don't seem to be expecting any additional answers from you. That doesn't explain why they're still _watching_ you though, and it's hard to look away when you can still feel their eyes on you.

The car, the Trans Am, coasts to a gradual stop outside a shadowed silhouette of a half-crumbled building. It looks like a defunct gas station. The lights are dark, and Poison makes short work of breezing in through the door and then ducking back out, having evidently cased the place and subsequently judged it to be clear. The sky is a diffuse smoky gray spattered with pinpricks of glistening white. The stars are so distant and smeared with thickening cloud cover and the flaws in the atmosphere, but it still squeezes your chest when you look up at them. You think, though you don't really _know,_ that the haphazard cluster of stars directly over your head _might_ be the old constellation that you and Nova had once termed "the Broken Vee-Eight."

You swallow back the ache of familiarity. Relief is a stinging in the corners of your eyes and heat that threatens to blur your vision.

You get out of the car with everyone else. The urge to turn and simply start walking rocks you to the tips of your toes and then to the balls of your feet as you look out and away, across the uneven landscape of the desert. They took you this far, but you're not one of them. These people did not ask to claim ownership of your problems and you did not ask for their involvement. It's instinct that stops you dead, because you _don't know them_ and it's pure common sense in the Zones to never turn your back on someone you do not know.

Poison stretches. Ghoul is chattering contentedly in Kobra's ear while Kobra watches him, straight-faced. Poison links their hands together and arches them over their head and rolls their neck and massages the balled joints of their knees.

"I'll take first watch," says Poison.

"The hell you are," says Kobra, immediately and without rancor. "You been driving all day. I'll do it."

Poison shrugs fluidly. And then, again, _again_ they look to you.

They don't say anything. They just look at you.

You stay.

For the duration of the night, you stay. You jerk awake in periodic fits of adrenaline shooting from spine to fingertips, which doesn't unsettle or surprise you at this point. More than once, you stumble out of the station and onto the tarmac outside, breathing hard, and let the desert's nighttime chill beat against the sheen of sweat on your face and turn it into something icy. More than once, you look up and you see the glittering swathe of stars and then, closer, the coal-red burn of a cigarette glowing above your head. Someone's smoking on the roof. Kobra, maybe. Or, if he's asleep by now, then Ghoul or Poison. You're trying not to think about the only other person you've ever known that smoked. You're trying not to let those memories claw their way out from the places where they've been buried. It's better not to think about them, so you don't.

You contemplate departure as easily as you contemplate the calm and casual destruction of self. You could walk out across the road and disappear from their lives with a complete lack of ceremony, and you're certain that they wouldn't protest. They wouldn't look for you. Like you have to keep telling yourself, _you're not one of them_, and you don't believe that they'd spare much thought to what would, hypothetically, come of you for separating from them.

Certainly, it would be more responsible to depart now. It would be easier, when you're not weathering Kobra's inexplicable concern or Ghoul's idle chatter or Poison's relentless and unendurable gaze.

You don't think they would stop you. You don't think they would _miss_ you. It would be easy and it would be the _right thing_ because no one has survived sustained contact with you and by now you're starting to believe that it's _you_ who's the problem. Unless it's just the odds. It could just be the odds. Who lasts that long, out here?

The problem is that you've lasted longer than you should. Statistically speaking.

"Hey," says the person on the roof. You look up and squint, and you can tell from the length of the hair, the way it's been lent a blueish cast by the faded desert night, that it's the Fun Ghoul.

He's been watching you stand here, staring out into the desert, for something like the past twenty minutes.

He doesn't say anything else.

The fact that he's already called out to you, already noticed you, has made the decision for you.

You climb onto the roof beside him. He offers you his coffin nail, but you shake your head. He snorts quietly.

"Yeah," he says, sounding scornful. "This shit'll kill you. Came right out here and got hooked on the first thing that weren't a pill, like a dumbass."

So Fun Ghoul, like so many others you've met, is from the city. The ease with which he both reveals this and then disdains himself by that very same metric takes you off guard, though you're not sure he catches your blink in the dark.

"Ain't much of a talker, are ya?" says Ghoul. The words feel, to you, amber stained with turquoise.

You shake your head.

Ghoul takes another drag of his cigarette. You squint at the dark, spidering shapes arrayed on his fingers, across his knuckles and the backs of his hands, but it's impossible to say what any of them might be in the poor lighting.

"That's cool," he says. "I mean, 's all right. Y'been walkin' all on your own for a while, or somethin'?" Before you can answer, Ghoul hastens to add, "or y'can tell me to shut the fuck up. Like, 's cool if y'don't feel like talkin' about it or whatever. Fuckin' lord knows Kobra don't talk about _shit_ from whatever went on with him 'n his sib back before I came along."

You hadn't realized it - that Poison and Kobra are related, that they traveled together for a time before the Ghoul eventually joined them. But you haven't had very many opportunities to study either of their faces at length. Now that you have the time to consider it, it makes more sense. It's a subtle similarity, more present in the curves of their faces and the arches of their cheekbones. It had been the shapes of their eyes that had leapt out at you the most, on first inspection - the way they curved downward and tapered off at the edges, the same way Doublestar's and Titan's had, though to a lesser extent. They're both mixed enough to the point where those features don't stand out, but for someone like you, they're noticeable. The resemblance between them hadn't been so striking that it was immediately obvious. 

You hadn't realized, either, that Ghoul didn't know either of them from the city. In ten seconds of conversation, you already know more about the three of them than you think you knew about Dust Devil or anyone else in their crew, and you're not sure how you're supposed to feel about that. Knowing anything about them only ever makes it harder when the mortality rate of the Zones inevitably catches up to them. You've done your best to protect those you've traveled beside and it's never been enough, and that's no one's fault but your own. You've never been fast enough, smart enough, precise enough - not _nearly enough_ to protect any of the nine dead souls still stuck to your shadow, to say nothing of the innumerable dracs and other zonerunners who've been caught in your crossfire.

For a moment, you and Ghoul are both silent. You breathe in the smoke he exhales and try not to think of Fever Queen. You look at the stars scattered overhead and try not to think of Nova Cane. You finger the sunglasses hanging from the collar of your shirt and try not to think of Dust Devil.

"Y'don't have to stay if y'don't wanna," says Ghoul at last.

You look at him.

"I'm just sayin'," says Ghoul, shrugging with a disarming cock of his head. His hair falls into his face a little. "I saw you lookin' out into the road. Y'wanna fuck off, I won't say nothin'."

You have no idea how it is you're meant to respond to that - what it is he _means_ for you to take away from that. That he wants you to leave? That he wants you to stay? It's not clear what he _wants_ from that and so you merely look at him. You catch his eyes, obliquely reflecting the lit end of his cigarette, and they're dark and intent.

"Mean it," he says quietly. "Won't tell nobody."

It's almost like he _expects_ you to go.

Something about that expectation has an unfamiliar weight. He's placed the choice in your hands without consultation of anyone else and _allowed_ you the option without passing any judgment, without any threat of repercussions. Someone is, for the first time in your life, giving you the right to make the decision as you see fit.

You see a road spooling out in two diverging paths. You see the choice to leave, and to keep walking as you had before they found you. You could endure as you have - alone, unmoored, without direction. You could go to Battery City, and see what it's really like, see how long you could last within the confines of those walls. You could go to Zone Seven. You could see how long it takes for the radiation there to kill you. You could go even farther, and try to see what lies beyond the Zones. You would be bound by nothing and no one. You could take whatever risks you like.

You see the choice to stay. You see the silhouettes of each of them, dying, one by one. You don't know them very well, but you already know that they've saved your life and the burden of whatever happens to them will still nest in the hollow pit of your soul, the same as everything else. It will still hurt. It will hurt less than it would if you choose to stay for longer, but even if they survive contact with you, they still won't survive forever because no one out here does. You see the choice to repay them for their unprompted kindness because, like it or not, you _owe them_, and you see the choice to keep repaying them until one or more of them dies because you fail them in an immediate and tangible sense - by not being fast enough, not shooting quick enough, not driving well enough, by _any number of things_ that have spelled failure for you in the past.

You see the choice as Ghoul has allotted it to you, and you don't know what do.

You look back to him, and you ask a question you have only ever asked once before, though you know it's not generally something you're _supposed_ to ask:

"Why do you stay?"

Ghoul laughs, and you don't think it's because he finds the question funny. It's a hazy little spurt of sound, ragged and mangled up and olive green, and he breathes smoke through his nose and rubs at his cheek with the back of his wrist.

"Why d'you _think?"_ He's still laughing. "They ain't kicked me out yet."

It's more of an answer than you're used to getting.

Six words, and the impetus behind Ghoul offering you that choice has become bitingly apparent. You look back out into the desert, the darkened cast of the sands beneath the star-speckled night sky. The heavens are almost as clear as you remember them being, like this. Almost.

"An', y'know. After a while 's just how it is."

He sucks in smoke and falls silent.

It's unbelievable to you that you're earnestly considering this - willingly and knowingly jeopardizing everything they are, the crew they've become, purely because the choice was presented to you. Do you destroy things, or do you make them better? Can you keep pretending that've any right to saddle anyone else with your failure?

"None of us," says Ghoul abruptly, "'s gonna make you stay if you don't wanna. That ain't who we are. So, y'know." He stubs out his cigarette on the gas station's roof and leans back with both palms braced behind him. "Don't gotta decide nothin' right away. Standin' offer, or whatever."

The longer you stay, the harder it will get to leave. You know this.

The Ghoul probably knows this too.

You nod once, and you begin to climb down from the roof.

When everyone else stirs awake the following morning, you're still there with them.

****

**\--**

**everything's okay  
give or take**

**\--**

If Poison's surprised that you've chosen to remain (though saying you actively "chose" anything doesn't feel quite right), it doesn't show. They get right back into the car and Kobra takes shotgun and you and Ghoul take the backseat and it feels unwieldy and uncertain, when you trail behind the three of them, but none of them stop you and none of them seem to take issue with the fact that you're still there. You sit in the backseat and you concentrate on looking out the window quietly and not looking at any of them.

Poison turns on the radio.

Mad Gear is an echoing chorus that crashes in unwavering amplitudes through the car, with such a powerful bass that you can feel it throbbing the seat and the floor beneath your feet. Poison is an active listener. They move in rhythm to the beat, scream the words out the open window, tap at the wheel with their fingers in time to the kick-drum. It's the most energetic you've seen them yet. At infrequent intervals, Ghoul joins in with raucous abandon. You catch Kobra mouthing the words, quieter than the rest, but semi-rarely, he joins the other two in his own flat, deadpan manner.

You close your eyes and let the music wash on in. The three of them, as they bounce seamlessly off one another, exude a sort of effortless camaraderie that you don't feel secure enough to intrude upon.

Halfway through the day, the signal cuts out to a chorus of boos and groans. You jerk awake, though you hadn't realized that you'd drifted off in the first place. You barely slept the night previous, but you can't recall the last time you actually slept well. Too many of your nights are riddled with instances in which you yank yourself awake, feel yourself sinking into a depth of sleep you cannot bear, and willfully uproot yourself free of it.

"Bitch!" snaps Ghoul, beating an erratic tattoo across the tops of his knees with both hands. "Aw, fuck, right in the middle of the breakdown."

Poison _tch_s with their tongue, disapproving, and scowls at the horizon. They floor the gas, and the car shoots ahead.

They stop around midday, when the sun is nearing its zenith. You sit out beside one of the pumps of the gas station where Poison pulled up, and watch beneath half-lidded eyes as Ghoul lifts the car's hood. He rummages at the interlocking tubing with a practiced hand, checks and double-checks all the parts of an engine that he _looks_ an awful lot like he knows inside and out, and then slams the thing shut. He sucks in the wall of his cheek thoughtfully, and then catches you looking at him and winks at you. You frown.

"Call it a day?" he calls to Poison, with an expectant lift to the words. "'S almost noon, motherfucker."

Poison exits the gas station. They shake the hair from their eyes and slip on a pair of glasses - dark with thin and glimmering rims, like the aviators you wear - as they look out across the heat-haze of the desert. The angle of the sun lends a shimmering nimbus to the eye-searing red of their hair. They stand out like a fucking beacon in the dust.

"Not here," they say at last. "Should move a ways out first."

Ghoul groans aloud.

"Not here," says Poison again, firmer.

"Who the fuck's gonna jump us, huh?"

"I _said,"_ says Poison, advancing, the words heavy and low. "Not. Here."

Nonplussed, Ghoul starts digging at his ear with his pinky.

"I mean, I'm just askin' why _here_ ain't any good. Gas station's got shelter, might even got _food_."

Poison shoots him a glare that looks as though they're attempting to liquify lead by the heat of their scowl alone. You half-expect Ghoul to shut down when he sees it, but he doesn't. You're starting to wonder if anything is actually capable of shutting Ghoul up.

"Y'scared or somethin'? Scared some dracs're gonna swing 'round and pop one off on ya?"

Poison scoffs and turns away.

"Hey! Hey, Kobra!" Ghoul leans across the hood of the car to yell at Poison's brother, who's currently browsing the racks of magazines for some reason. "Wouldn't y'rather stay _here_ than run around in the heat lookin' for someplace to sleep?"

Kobra's eyes dart, briefly, to Poison. Then he shrugs.

"No," he says.

Ghoul groans again, loudly.

"You all suck."

Poison, it seems, is paranoid in just about every way it's possible to be. They eat nothing that they don't open from a sealed package or can with their own hands or that they don't see made in front of them or that they prepare themself. They only settle for the night in abandoned areas where no one else can be seen for miles.

It's apparent, too, that Poison is the leader here. They're the one who calls the shots. They're the one that everyone turns to when it comes to making a decision. Kobra and Ghoul both turn to them _first_, the moment they float any idea, and wait for Poison to weigh in. It's a dynamic you've seen before, but the means by which it's carried out is new. 

Party Poison is not Doublestar, and they are not Dust Devil.

They do not act as though they're meant to teach you or anyone else how to be. They do not treat you or Kobra or Ghoul as people who require their direction. They do not ratchet out orders with the unspoken expectation that you follow them without question. They do not separate you into your capabilities and leave you with the subtle anticipation that you will fulfill the role they have allotted to you. They do not assume your cooperation in every effort. They look _back_ to Kobra, they look _back_ to Ghoul, as if gauging their support before agreeing to go through with anything.

You're not sure what to make of that.

Eventually, you offer to take watches for them while the others rest. It seems like the least you can do in exchange for them allowing you to travel at their side. None of them protest it. Ghoul even grins at you and makes a motion that suggests he's about to clap you on the shoulder before rethinking it mid-swing.

Traveling with Party Poison isn't always being on the move. You learn this when you wake to the unmistakable buzz of distant raygun blasts.

Your reaction to this is immediate. You roll out from the backseat of the Trans Am, bolt to your feet, and your gun is out in a sharp, instinctive pull. Already you're scanning the surrounding desert, trying to pick up the source of the altercation. The car is empty. The air is notably bereft of the acrid tang of ozone. Whatever's happening, it's not close.

A distant whoop draws your ear. You make for the source of sound immediately at a dead sprint, powering over the sandy bluffs of Zone Five.

The sight that greets you stops you dead. Your heart hammers an unrelenting rhythm in your chest. Adrenaline burns and blurs in your blood. You're having trouble fully parsing what it is that you're looking at.

Namely, a line of cans sizzling in the sand, scorched by laser fire and knocked clean off the sun-baked rubber of an ancient tire.

"Oh, fuck. Hey! Jet!" Ghoul bounces slightly on the balls of his feet as he waves. Beside him, Poison blows nonexistent smoke away from the barrel of their gun, and Kobra folds his arms and looks at you. "Was wonderin' when you'd wake up. Y'wanna shoot shit?"

They're shooting cans off old tires.

You make a concentrated effort to slow your breathing. There's no masking the fact that your gun is out, that you _ran_ here, that reflex carried you over to them at a rapid clip. The sun is still rising, ground fog curling out from the sand. The orange-tan rays light up the backs of everyone's hair and makes them difficult to look at. You squint, shade your eyes.

"Yo, bring the car over if you're gonna shoot with us," says Ghoul. "Don't want no Zone-rats gettin' ideas or anythin' like that, y'know?"

Your mouth is dry. You force a nod.

Poison saunters over to you and tosses you something, underhand. It sails above your head in a high, parabolic arc, glittering in the sun, before you dart out a hand and catch it.

The car keys are slightly warm against your fingers.

Your eyes meet Poison's. You're certain that you don't manage to stamp out the puzzlement from your gaze when you regard them warily.

They angle their head up in the direction of the car, and turn away.

"Bet you can't knock 'em all off without missing," says Kobra. Poison scoffs, but you don't hear their reply. You're busy climbing the bluff back to the car, the keys to the Trans Am tight in your fist.

You have been handed car keys before. That in and of itself is not so special. You have driven cars for others before. (Doublestar pressed them into your palms and told you to _go_ so you _went_ as fast as you possibly could.) You learned to drive at the express request of others. (Dust Devil insisted you should learn and you had because it was what he had wanted.) Neither occasion is comparable to this one - the tacit trust that led to the tossing of keys and the assumption that you would listen. You haven't known any of them very long. A few weeks, maybe, at the most. You're not _one_ of them.

Nonetheless, in spite of the paranoia you _know_ Poison carries because you've witnessed it firsthand, they handed you the keys and said nothing else. There was only an unspoken assurance that you would not take their entire livelihood and go. It would be perfectly feasible. Others have taken more for far less.

There is a newness to the exchange that sits unevenly in your soul.

You're still mulling this over when you pull the car in behind Poison and the rest. Kobra immediately leans up against the warming hood, slipping on a pair of sunglasses as the sun continues to rise. The refracting light lends a spectacular bronze cast to his bleached-pale hair.

"Thanks," says Poison. "You feel like joinin' us?"

You look out across the expanse of sand, across the makeshift shooting range, over to the old tire where Ghoul is flattening the cans into colorful aluminum discs beneath his boots and stacking them beside one another. You think of the atonal hum of a charging raygun blast. You think of the way the sound of guns sparking off had wrenched you out of your restive sleep and sent you hurtling over the bluffs in search of the trio of killjoys who have seen fit to put up with you for the time being. You think of the _zat_ of a fired laser and how many times you've cut others down and how many times you've seen _others_ cut down and you cannot in good faith try and go back to tally the dead that must surely stalk you still because your body count, like that of so many others in the Zones, is so immense that you can no longer keep track.

You look out at the cans that the others have set up to shoot, presumably for sport, presumably for no real reason that immediately presents itself to you. They don't look to be honing their skills. They can all shoot just fine. They're daring one another for arbitrary gain, issuing pointless challenges, and when was the last time you fired your gun and it wasn't because you had to fight or die? When you learned how to aim and fire by shooting cans, a million years ago? When you taught yourself how to petition to the Witch for guidance, because you could not shoot straight when there were shades dogging your footsteps?

Poison is waiting for an answer. Their eyebrows are raised very subtly as they wait for you to say or do something that would indicate you've heard them.

You're too busy trying to remember the last time you fired your gun and the stakes weren't absolute.

"'Kay," says Ghoul, heading back to the rest of you. "First fucker to shoot 'em like _this_ gets a free pack of Sizzle Stix. C'mon, who wants it?"

"That shit has been in your pockets for literally weeks," says Kobra flatly. _"No one_ wants that."

"Blow me, Kobra."

Again you look out at the stretch of sand between you and the targets. They've been compressed into slivers of aluminum that glint faintly in the morning light.

Poison is still looking at you. Their stare is as unendurable as always. There's an inappropriate intensity to their gaze that doesn't suit the decidedly casual circumstance, and you have to wonder if maybe it's just _you_ who can't weather their look, strange and steel-eyed and unrelenting, because no one has ever looked at you like that before. You're not the sort of person who gets looked at in that way. Like what you have to say has any merit, any bearing on what happens next.

Because the pressure of their stare is so immense, because Ghoul and Kobra are now jabbing companionably at one another, because no one has taken up Ghoul's challenge, because no one is addressing the sincere _strangeness_ in the fact that Poison trusted you with the car and had no genuine reason to, because of a hundred other things you cannot currently enumerate to yourself, you step forward and you raise your gun. The midnight blue paint has been reduced to a clouded and grayish periwinkle in places.

The targets are small, but they're stationary, and they're not too far away. One, two, three, four, five, you shoot them all clean off the tire without hesitation. You catch the whiff of ozone from the tip of your raygun when you lower it. It speeds up your heart again.

There's silence behind you.

Then -

"Holy shit," says Ghoul.

You breathe.

Ghoul jogs out to the targets lying spent in the sand and utters a loud, barking sound of amusement. 

"Holy _shit!"_ he says again. He looks up at you, and there's a naked delight on his features that makes him look, you suspect, his actual age. "You didn't even scorch the tire. What the _fuck."_

You can't keep yourself from looking back over your shoulder at Poison, and when you glance at them, they're smiling faintly.

"Could you always shoot like that?" says Kobra. He moves to stand next to you, sliding off his sunglasses to frown at the cans lying in the dust.

You shrug slightly with the incremental lift of one shoulder.

"Yeah."

"How far?"

Again, you shrug. You've never measured. You've only ever guessed, made vague estimations based on what you know of distance.

"C'mon," says Kobra. He slips his sunglasses back on.

Per Kobra's estimation, it turns out that you can shoot a flattened can off the hood of the Trans Am from something like two hundred meters away. Poison narrows their eyes when their brother has you shoot cans off the car, but they don't say anything about it when it turns out that you don't leave so much as a smear of char on the paint.

You're at an advantage. You're not from the city. You aren't wracked with lingering fevers and muscle tremors the way so many others are. You can shoot cleanly without shaking hands and you have a steadier aim than anyone.

"Hell of a shot," says Kobra at last. The words sound warped beneath the weight of some emotion you can't name. It takes you a moment to place it as admiration.

However long it's been since you've shot at stationary targets for _fun,_ however long it's been since you did something, anything, that was not for the express purpose of furthering your own survival or the survival of those around you, the sensation of a genuine smile is so foreign that it's nearly unrecognizable when it tugs at one corner of your lips.

"Thanks."

****

**\--**

**the cat's got the canary spinning in its ribcage  
did i mention i came dressed for the intervention**

**\--**

A search for water drives the Trans Am dangerously close to the city. The supply here, claims Poison, is the quickest and easiest access to Battery City's water mains, provided you know how to dodge the dracs and exterminators. They say they know the cycles of all the patrols in the area. That doesn't change that crossing through Zone One always leaves you tense. You associate it exclusively with running for your life while being shot at, and seeing others bleed in the sand. Watching the taut line of Kobra's back as he helps Poison carry an old water cooler through the area, you suppose you're not the only one with bitingly negative associations.

You forget, sometimes. They all came from the city. You hate the place on principle, because you've seen what it's capable of doing and what it's capable of taking away, but Poison and Kobra and Ghoul and almost everyone else you've met hate it for reasons more personal. They probably don't want to be here any more than you do.

The Kobra Kid assures you that Poison's got a plan for situations like these. You're not sure how best to explain that this wouldn't be the first time you've heard more or less that exact justification. You let it lie.

The set of his jaw and the restive flick of his eyes as he periodically scans the horizon is a dead giveaway that he's not as reassured as he'd lead you to believe. He and Poison both have their masks on, which makes sense - if they're from the city, they wouldn't want to be recognized. Poison's is bright yellow, and Kobra's a dark and bold red. It's strange to see them wearing each other's colors.

For your part, you haven't bothered with a mask. You've never needed one before now. Poison didn't press the point.

"Can you watch our six?" says Poison.

It's the little things. It shouldn't be the little things, but it is. It's everyone stopping to do shit like shoot cans off tires for fun or pausing in their day to watch tumbleweeds go rolling by for no apparent reason. It's Kobra tossing you a fresh can of paint to lay over your raygun, unasked and unprompted. It's Poison asking you if you'll help, instead of telling you. It's Ghoul asking if it's cool that he can lean on your shoulder before he does it.

Poison asks you if you'll watch their six and you pull your gun and scan the horizon while they and Kobra hunker down and start filling a portable liquid tank with water. They must be accessing a pipe that runs underneath the ground from or to the city itself, because there's nothing out here that would merit the redirection of something as precious as water in any vast quantities. The Ghoul waits out of sight with the car in case you all need a quick escape. You've seen him work on the car enough to know why that responsibility is being entrusted to him.

You spot the dracs first, and Poison catches the lift of your gun as you level it on the white blots backlit against the horizon, aiming close - 

"They seen us?" says Poison quietly.

You squint against the cream-colored midmorning sky, smoky the way the skies always are in Zone One. They're not moving toward you.

"Don't," says Poison. "If they ain't seen us, then _don't."_

It runs counter to every instinct you have. You're certain that some of your incredulity shows on your face when you look to them, but you gradually let your gun drop. You don't holster it. Every nerve tingles with the urge to snap it up and start shooting, rain lightning and electromagnetism on those draculoids before they know what hit them, before they wise up to what's happening on their turf. Every moment that passes, you risk losing the advantage of taking them by surprise. Again, you glance back to Poison and their brother.

"Maybe..." says Kobra, trailing off. Then: "Maybe move faster." The words are a little too tight.

"Geddown, Jet," hisses Poison. "I ain't fillin' this shit while gettin' shot at and they don't see us yet."

You hesitate.

"They're gonna _see you."_

Everything your blood screams that you should pick them off _now,_ take advantage of the fact that they wouldn't see it coming, but you can feel Party Poison staring at you, so you quietly drop into a crouch beside them.

"Almost done." Poison's focus is intent and unblinking as they continue to feed water into the tank. "We'll hit max cap soon, and then we can motor out - "

_"¡Aguas!"_ You bark it out as you practically slam into Kobra with the effort to force him to the ground. Laser fire immediately sears into the sand around all three of you. You're whirling up in the next moment, returning fire. Not fast enough. It's not a surprise when the shot bites into your shoulder with the rapid flare-and-fade of plasma burn that's become so familiar to you. It's familiar enough for you to barely flinch. You lever yourself upright with your good arm and blitz down the drac that got luckier than most. Its shot managed to hit, though you think it was actually meant for Kobra but was poorly aimed.

"Fuck! Fuck, let's _go!"_ Kobra struggles to his feet and slams the tank shut and starts lugging it out across the dust. Poison grabs the other handle, but their gun is already out. Maneuvering must be awkward with the heavy liquid tank full of water sloshing between them.

Your shoulder burns. You swap your gun to your other hand and cut down the first exterminator to join the bleached white knot of draculoids. You learned how to shoot with both hands a long time ago. You can still remember the first time your shooting hand got fried and you had to teach yourself ambidexterity - but you're not thinking about that. The exterminator doesn't even get a chance to fire off their gun. The dracs can shoot just fine, though, and seem to be intent on aiming for you in particular since you happen to be the only one shooting back.

"Jet!" You barely register the orange glow of Kobra's shout. You're not gut-shot and you're not bleeding out so you'll live. The burn feels like more of a graze than anything. You've had worse. You know you've had worse. This won't kill you. At this point, you're not sure if anything _will._

Right now, that's for the best. More white-hot laser fire sizzles at you, forcing you to scuffle back in retreat but if you go back too far you risk putting Kobra and Poison in the crosshairs - 

That's right around the time that the Ghoul sends the Trans Am careening over the nearest bluff with enough force to catch one drac underneath the tires and slam forcefully into a second. They scatter like flies, scrambling and uttering hoarse, panicked sounds. They're easier to pick off when they're trying to scrape themselves off the ground.

_"SUCK IIIIIT,"_ Ghoul is bellowing, klaxon-loud. He backs up the car and rams it into another drac with a vicious enthusiasm, grinning mean and wild.

A hand catches your shoulder. You twist around with your gun out, despite the answering pulse of pain emanating from your shoulder, your heart in your throat. Kobra immediately steps back with his hands out.

"We need to - "

Ghoul has less subtlety. He turns his shrieking attention to you and makes no attempt to dial down his volume in the slightest.

"Get in the fucking _car, Jet!"_

You dive into the passenger seat while Poison and Kobra haul their takings into the back. Ghoul immediately floors it and the tires spit up sand as the car speeds out over the dust.

"How bad 's it?" says Kobra, sitting up. "Jet. How bad?"

"How bad's _what?"_ Ghoul is mostly watching where he's going, which is frankly what he should be doing anyway. You wince when an uneven dip of the tires in the sand scrapes cloth over the fresh laser burn.

"Jet got hit," says Kobra. You can feel his eyes on you.

"Oh, shit," says Ghoul.

You shrug off your jacket and study the injury with a rote, clinical detachment. You've been shot too many times for it to bother you anymore. The graze across your shoulder is a shallow burn but a wide one; it's taken off a layer of skin the size of your hand. You stifle a sigh. Cleaning out the wound, most likely, is going to hurt more than sustaining the injury itself.

"Shallow," you say at last, when you realize everyone's looking at you. _"No hay bronca."_

"What?" says Kobra.

"It's fine," you clarify.

"Should've gotten down," says Poison, "like I _said."_

The Trans Am descends into silence.

You look out the window and grimace. They're right, you know. They're right, and not merely because they're _in charge,_ the tacit leader of this crew that you have more or less wound up a temporary part of without meaning to be for weeks or possibly months now. You've fought beside them and shared their food and watched their backs while they've watched yours, and there's only so long you can travel with them before it becomes unspoken that you're one of them. 

They know Zone One better than you do. They grew up in the city.

You should have listened.

"Yeah," you say quietly.

That evening, while the rest of the group gathers around their nightly communal fire, you check the strip of cloth bandage you bound around the fresh wound and ease it away. It doesn't look any worse than it did earlier, but it needs cleaning - certainly more than it got before.

Quiet footfalls in the sand catch your ear. You look up a second before the Kobra Kid crouches down next to you. He holds out a plastic water bottle that, for some reason, has had its label torn away. You know for a fact that he and Poison didn't manage to fill the tank the whole way, so the thought that he'd waste that sparse resource on you strikes you as more than a little odd.

"Here."

He must catch your uncertainty, because he sighs and pulls off his sunglasses and drops so that he's sitting beside you instead.

"Figured you'd need it."

He's still sitting there, holding out a bottle partially full of water that you got shot today helping him retrieve. You take it and start to gently clean away the blood and char from the place where the laser fried your skin. It stings, naturally, but the pain is bearable. Even when you're peeling away places where the cloth has stuck to the tack of your own blood, it's bearable.

"Thanks."

Kobra sits there for a minute, seemingly watching you. 

"Poison's a dick," he says at last.

You won't pretend you don't know where that came from. You don't stop to look at him until you've finished rinsing out the injury in its entirety, and by the time you do, Kobra is gnawing on the knuckle of his index finger and he's not looking at you anymore.

"Just mad that you got shot and that I _almost_ got shot, like it don't happen all the time out here. They give people shit. 'S how they give a damn." The Kid hunches his shoulders slightly and grimaces at the dirt. "Just sayin'. They're a dick."

You study him silently for a moment. He doesn't seem like he's done speaking, and you're right.

This is familiar. You're not thinking of the last person you met who was drawn to you because you would listen silently and not judge while ze vented without direction. You're not thinking of that, though. It's not important. It hasn't been important for months now.

"'S how they deal. Don't like losin' people. So they shit on you 'cause it makes 'em feel like they're in control or something."

This is familiar, but you're not sure you want to sit through it again.

"It's okay," you answer at last.

Kobra's expression scrunches up into a scowl.

"It ain't," he mutters, but there's not a lot of bite to it.

You wipe away the remaining crust of scabbed blood and drying blackened cloth stuck to your skin with the remnants of your makeshift bandage. You're going to have to stitch a new one to cover the burn, so you rinse out whatever squares of fabric you still have on hand and sew them together one-handed, like you've grown used to doing. 

Kobra watches you do it. He's silent as you wind the new bandage over and around your upper shoulder, covering the wound completely, then tug your jacket back over it. The discolored cloth shows through the old, sun-cracked leather. You'll have to patch that too. The jacket wasn't going to remain fully intact forever, not out here.

You don't have the resources for that now. You pass the bottle back to Kobra.

"That's a flag on your back, right?" says Kobra. He takes the bottle and rolls it between his hands as he watches you obliquely. "American flag?"

You're not sure where he's going with this. You nod.

"Haven't seen one of those in..." The words trail off. Kobra shakes his head and rubs at the bridge of his nose. "Sorry 'bout your jacket."

A shrug. "It's okay."

"Quit sayin' that. You saved my ass today, y'know that? 'S bullshit."

The transition between the two subjects catches you off guard, and you blink at him, startled. Kobra is staring out at the line of pink-orange still limning the horizon as the sun starts to huddle behind the slopes and inclines of the desert, determinedly not looking at you. He's rubbing the bottle restively between his hands, and suddenly it becomes very clear why it is the bottle had no label when he handed it to you. He picks at divots and flaws in the plastic with his fingernails, drums at the cap with his thumbs, runs his knuckles up and down the length of it.

"Bullshit that you sit out here and you patch _yourself_ up and do it away from all the rest of us. Got shot savin' _me_ and savin' Poison. It ain't right. So don't say _it's okay,_ 'cause it ain't."

He lapses into silence again, breathing a little heavy, like he didn't expect to go saying all of that at once. He stares fixedly at the faint glow of light that's all that's become of the setting sun before tossing the old, battered water bottle to the ground and drawing up his knees so he can fold his arms across the tops of them. It's a motion that's decidedly casual, and you think that might've been what he meant it to be, but instead it makes him seem - besieged.

"'S how it's gotta be out here," says Kobra, and this time the words are so quiet that you wonder if he means for you to hear them. "We watch each other's backs. Take care of our own."

_Our own._

_She's one of us,_ snaps someone in the beds of your memory. _That means we have her back, Devil._

You stretch each leg slowly, roll your head on your neck until some of the stiffness in your joints starts to ease away, and you stand. Kobra's still not looking at you, and he continues to not look at you until you shift to face him and you can feel the budding warmth of something slid just underneath your ribs, something incredibly dangerous because this is where it always starts - but if you're honest with yourself, it all started long before now. You've traveled beside these zonerunners. You've eaten their food and shared their fires and fought for them and taken hits for them and there's only so long that you can do a thing like that and remain in a state of plausible deniability. Kobra's just the first one to say it to you, even indirectly, and there's a tension that's been clenching your frame for weeks that you hadn't even realized was there before it starts to unravel.

You can hope with all that you are that you won't be the death of any of them. You can _hope,_ but more than anything, you have to make an effort. If it means taking a laser blast that would kill one of them and ends up ghosting you instead, you'll take those odds. You'll take those odds if it means not having to sit and watch another friend die.

You don't say anything of that to Kobra. Instead, you hold out a hand.

He takes it, palm to palm, fingers knitted through your own, and lets you help him up.

"Thanks," you tell him.

"C'mon," says Kobra, with a jerk of his chin.

You follow him back to the fire.

****

**\--**

**(and if you were dying soon would you try to find snow in the deep summer  
the june bugs dancing in wonder**

**\--**

Near as you can tell, Party Poison has two modes. They have the mode wherein they are the _jefe_, unquestioned and unquestionable. They are solemn and deliberate and careful and precise and they take in things quietly and pull together the details and make the decisions that merit making. They do not ever say things as though they expect anyone to follow through without hesitation; they only _look_ at everyone once it's all laid out, and wait for their answer. They don't do things with hesitation and they don't do them with shades of doubt. They radiate certainty with every step. There's a confidence and assuredness to their raised chin and the set of their shoulders that reminds you in small strokes of the people and the things you once wished you could be. If it's difficult for them to always be the loaded gun and the one with the forethought and the intent and the ability to make the decisions, it doesn't show. That is the mode in which they look at you and you can see them separating you into all your component parts and assessing you with calm, quick deliberation.

Then they have the mode that only springs to life when they are surrounded by the fire of their efforts, the feral grin and the sunburst laughter and the sheer, soaring _high_ of live combat. Everything about them is red - bright and unrelenting and the same electric color as their hair. Their words, their sounds, their laughter, all of it is lit up in madder-rich ecstasy. That is when their expression is open, almost painfully earnest, and when they scream like the wild thing they are. That is when their mirth rebounds off of canyons and flurries like ash and is reflected in Ghoul's shrill cries and Kobra's bristling laughs.

They also get that way, you learn, when it comes to music.

The Trans Am is never quiet. Its passengers are always loud, and unapologetically so. Poison shrieks the words into the sky with their grip tight on the wheel, in a way that you're learning is pretty typical of them. Ghoul belts the chorus in the front beside them while you bounce your leg to the brassy thud of the bass that rattles the Trans Am's tinny speakers. 

That's the nice thing about the music out here. Most of it's meant to be piped out of shitty radios and transmitted over static-laced airwaves. If the sound cuts out or gets overridden by the buzz of snow, it's hard to say whether that's a consequence of the life out here or an artistic choice. It makes it that much easier to bear.

"God _damn,"_ says Poison, shaking the hair from their eyes as the broadcast goes fuzzy and quiet. _"Damage Control._ Best fuckin' record Mad Gear ever put out."

You open your mouth - and promptly close it when you realize you're not entirely sure it's wise to articulate the thought that's entered your head. You know better than to argue with the person in charge after what happened in Zone One.

Poison catches your eye in the side mirror, though, and they smirk at you.

Something about the way their eyes crease when they grin takes some of the sharpness from their gaze. It feels less like they're taking you apart with their eyes, less like being approached for a surgical incision into your fucking soul, when they've got humor filing away the natural sting from their speech.

"Oh, you don't think so, Jet?" says Poison. From anyone else, the words would come across as taunting. On the surface level, they sound like a dare. But they're still smiling, and it's at an askew enough angle for you to think that, maybe, you're not being baited.

"No, 'cause Jet ain't a fuckin' _purist_ like you are," says Ghoul, interrupting with his usual languor. "'Cause everybody who ain't down a couple hundred brain cells knows that ain't no record's ever gonna top _TROMOTIZED."_

"Fuck you," says Poison, laughing. "Everybody knows Mad Gear's _best_ shit is from the early tens. One day he'll head back to his roots, 'n all."

"My name's _Party Poison,_ and I only like the same three crusty records that was made when I was a tiny, tiny baby," says Ghoul.

Poison nudges him with a huff that you think was meant to sound irritated, but their mouth is twitching like they're fighting back a smile. Ghoul only snickers.

For a moment, the Trans Am is mostly silent. A rarity.

You choose that moment to say, "Ghoul's right."

"Fuck you _too!"_ barks Poison, the words only barely audible over Ghoul's raucous laughter in the passenger seat. Beside you, the Kobra Kid snorts.

When you catch Poison's eye in the side mirror again, they're still smirking.

Less than a week later, after you and Kobra have negotiated with a passing crew for the price of some packages of protein blocks to eat over the fire, Ghoul says he's got a surprise for everybody, and that surprise turns out to be some _refrescos_. None of you are honestly in need of any caffeine and sugar burning through your veins this late in the evening when you're about ready to bunk down for the night, but forcing down cubes of tasteless protein has left you, for one, wanting something to cut the gritty texture still stuck in your teeth.

"This shit's gone flat," says Kobra, making a face as he passes you the can. The lip of it is still warm from his mouth when you suck down a swig of the juice. It's sickly sweet, dry of carbonation, and tasting faintly of the aluminum it's been sitting in for god knows how long. It's disgusting, and it tastes like nights spent staring at skies and quiet words between friends. You savor the metallic cling to the roof of your mouth.

"Next time I'll shake up your can so it ain't so _flat_ anymore, then," says Ghoul. "How's that for fuckin' gratitude, dipshit?"

Kobra flips him off.

You pass the can to Poison, who considers it for a long moment without drinking from it. You lean back slightly so you're angled a little more toward them, palm against the dirt.

_"Damage Control_ is good," you say at last. Poison's eyes flick up to meet yours so fast that you think you might have caught them off guard. For half a moment they study you silently before their expression cracks into that uneven smile that's starting to grow more and more familiar.

"Suck-up," they say at last. "You're just sayin' that to get on my good side."

Across the fire, Ghoul burps.

"You don't have a good side," he says.

_"All_ my sides is good sides," says Poison, imperious, but they're still looking at you. "I'm fuckin' perfect."

_"Damage Control_ is good," you insist.

"Don't be a bitch." Poison laughs as they say it, though, and sip from the can once before passing it back over to Ghoul. Then they lean forward, hands draped across their knees. Their face is starting to acquire that strange intensity that grows increasingly difficult to look at. "All right, wiseass. Say you could rank _every_ Mad Gear release, one t'six. Where would you put 'em all?"

You hold up one finger with no hesitation. _"Troma."_ Because that's the record that saved your life.

"Word," drawls Ghoul, taking a long gulp from the can. Kobra practically has to swipe it out of his hands.

"Don't hog the juice, asshole."

Ghoul scrambles to reclaim it with a yelp of dismay, but Kobra leans back to keep the can out of his reach.

"What happened to it bein' _flat_, huh?"

Poison is doing an excellent job of ignoring them. They're still watching you.

Two fingers. _"Nobody fucking loves you."_

"Ohh, passin' over _SkeleTon KreW_ is a fuckin' _crime,_ hotshot," says Ghoul, who seems to have forgone wrestling Kobra for the can of soda in favor of watching you rank Mad Gear's best.

"Self-titled. _Damage Control. SkeleTon KreW. Straight through to hell,"_ you rattle off, ticking them down one by one. Then, smoothly, you accept the can from Kobra and take a long draught, never once looking away from Poison's fixed, intent stare.

"Go _fuck_ yourself, Jet Star," says Poison.

You can't help yourself. You laugh at that, a short burst of warmth that surprises you with the ease of it, because you can't remember the last time you laughed at anything earnestly.

"Your order," continues Poison, with an all-important air, "is _back-ass-wards._ Jesus. You puttin' _The Mad Gear and Missile Kid_ in _third place?_ As if there weren't any debut stronger'n that one, _Christ."_

"You never even _heard_ that shit when it came out," says Kobra, abruptly disdainful. "You didn't hear a thing about Mad Gear 'till _after_ Battery City, same as the rest of us."

Ghoul backs out a laugh, loud and unrepentant.

"Oh, shit. Got your _number,_ Party Poison!"

"Don't mean I can't still appreciate _art,"_ says Poison. Their tone somehow manages to communicate the airs of someone looking down their nose at him. It's possible that this succeeds because Ghoul is half-leaning, half-sprawling on the ground, and because Poison consistently exudes an inexplicable air of authority by default.

You pass them the can, and they take it.

"Agree to disagree."

"I will agree that you are fuckin' objectively wrong," says Poison, and they hold up two fingers to point at you as they say it before tossing back the remainder of the Ghoul's soda in a long swig.

Kobra snorts. 

You suppose that, with Poison, that's the closest to a concession that you're going to get. They're not really one for apologies.

****

**\--**

**and i still wonder now  
if my words will still turn you inside out)**

**\--**

If Tommy Chow Mein recognizes you when you again set foot on his premises, he doesn't say anything about it. He doesn't take umbrage with your presence, either, though he does shoot Poison a nasty glare when they enter. Nonplussed, Poison simply tosses him a casual nod. He doesn't kick them out though, which is all that matters. His front in Zone Six is pretty empty, but this far out, it would be. You wonder what he does with his stock when he's swapping locations. Clearly he's not packing it all up and driving it around the desert every time he relocates to another Zone, but there has to be a way he keeps it safe from scavengers and thieves and waveheads. There's no telling how he does it, and you're not so stupid as to ask.

You watch the Kobra Kid comb through the shelves. He's looking for some fresh paint for the Trans Am and for his helmet, which he's been voicing his desire to repaint for days now, and Ghoul's poking around in search of more battery packs. From the way Chow Mein routinely leans over the counter to glower at him with even more venom than usual, you'd guess that he trusts the Ghoul significantly less than he trusts Poison, though calling it "trust" at all feels like a stretch. Expectation, maybe.

Society crawls ever onward. Even here.

The back of Kobra's jacket is red and shiny. He's got the letters to his name printed on the black stripes running down the arms. Despite the inevitable wear and tear that's claimed it, it's clear that he's proud of the article.

"Check this shit," says Ghoul, holding up a strip of cloth. You recognize the pattern immediately. He waves the bandana patterned with red-and-white stripes, stars mounted on a blue background, with a triumphant grin. "Me 'n Jet can _match."_

You look away, rubbing at your mouth. By now, you think you know the Ghoul well enough to know that he's being completely unabashed in his victory. He seems to take genuine pride in being able to wear the same symbol as you.

"Batteries, Ghoul," hisses Kobra.

"Lick _my_ battery, jackass, I already got 'em." Ghoul waves a plastic bag stuffed full of them, offhand. "I'm just sayin', if I got extra sugar, I'm gonna make a flag gang with Jet. Whaddaya say, Jet? Wanna be in my flag gang?"

Kobra rolls his eyes and returns to his search for paint. You feel the hard angle of your smile cutting into your cheek. You turn away quickly, but you catch Ghoul's grin. He always sees when he makes you laugh. He seems to revel in it.

You watch Poison in the corner of your eye as they tap a can of hair dye against the butt of their palm. With the Dust Devil, you'd always paid for your own goods. You're not sure if that's the standard around here, considering how many of the supplies you're all hunting for will be shared and distributed between the four of you. It's hard to say. Poison's eyes are distant, and they seem thoughtful. They're not paying much attention to you, or anyone else.

You flip open a flat tin and poke at the slender, hollow needles and spools of colored thread nestled inside it. For your part, you've been keen on picking up something in the way of first aid supplies, considering how you had to make do with the burn to your shoulder, but it looks like this is the closest thing to it that this particular front has. It's not nothing, though.

You're midway through tallying up the estimated cost, assuming that Poison has _some_ favor with Tommy that isn't completely counterbalanced by the considerable lack of favor that Ghoul obviously has, when Kobra leans over to nudge Ghoul, weighing several cans of spray paint in his hands.

"Spare me some c's?" he mutters. "Don't think I can cover all this."

"You only like me for my money," says Ghoul, but he's already digging the coins from his pockets. Though you know paper money nominally still exists in the Zones, most everyone will swap it for coins as soon as they can. Wads of bills don't last very long in the weather typical of the desert.

"Buy them together," you catch yourself saying, and then they're both looking at you.

"What?" says Ghoul.

You make a loose circular gesture with one hand to indicate the summation of your prospective purchases between the three of you.

"Pool together. 'S maybe fifty, sixty c's. Split the change."

Those are more words than you typically need to make your point. This looks to take them both off guard, because they glance at each other and then back to you, but Ghoul rubs at his chin thoughtfully.

"Uh," he says. "Y'think we got that much all together?"

"Sure," says Kobra, shrugging. "We're gonna share this shit anyway. Lemme just - "

He darts around you, dumping the cans of paint into your arms as he goes, and you're left juggling to keep them from raining to the floor in a tinny cascade. You have the feeling that, despite the fact that Chow Mein doesn't seem to be holding your history with him against you, he wouldn't take very kindly to you showering the ground with his merchandise.

"I'm not sharin' this with anybody unless they're joinin' my flag gang," says Ghoul, frowning at his bandana. Despite yourself, you snort softly.

When the four of you pour your sum spoils onto the counter, Tommy Chow Mein narrows his eyes at the mess. Poison has their chin up, their back straight. They meet his gaze unflinchingly. As a result, you don't spend as long haggling down prices as usual. It seems that Poison just happens to have that effect on others.

"If we're splittin' the change even," says Ghoul as he hefts his cans of paints into the trunk of the Trans Am, "that'd leave us all with, uh..."

"Five each," you finish for him. You've been doing the math. Compared to the calculations you had to make for the predicted arc of falling satellites, it's easy. It's just numbers. "Two extra."

Kobra looks at you sidelong in a way that makes you think he didn't expect you to whip that answer out so fast. There's only a brief pause before someone breaks the silence.

"Shiny," says Poison. 

"Who gets the spares?" says Ghoul. He's already tying his new bandana around his neck, yanking it up around the lower part of his face.

"Jet bought the least." Kobra nods in your direction. No one has any objection to this - two carbons aren't nearly enough _chavos_ for anyone to get up in arms over who gets the change.

Less than a week later, Kobra's slashing a fresh layer of paint along the side of the car. The Ghoul is sat on the roof of the side of the ancient, unmanned gas station whose remaining water supply Poison is currently purloining for the sake of re-dying their hair. Ghoul's flipping through the spare mags he dug out from under the counter on account of having nothing else to do; the fuel dispensers have all long since been drained and uprooted, and his cursory digging around has indicated that the tanks under the earth are as bone-dry and bereft as the desert. You're standing a few feet away from the car and scanning the horizon with a methodical focus every few minutes, on the sharp lookout for anything that might happen by to threaten the uneasy peace.

"Jet." Kobra says it like he's had to repeat your name several times in the past few minutes. You blink and look back at him. "You good?"

You nod. Nothing's in the distance, coming for you. No dracs, no exterminators, no scarecrows, no potentially hostile gangs.

"This side's blank." Kobra inclines his head in the direction of the car. 

It takes you a minute to register that he's asking for your help. Warily, you join him and regard the dark paint of the Trans Am's side door.

The Kid shakes up a can of red paint, staring at the canvas of the car.

"That thing you said. _No hay bronca,"_ he says, with no prompting. His inflection is a little off, slightly clumsy, like he's never said the words before. "That was Spanish, right?"

You tilt your head to one side slightly when you look at him, but you nod.

"Yeah. Sounded like it." But he had to ask. No one in this crew tends to drop very many words in other languages, except for maybe the occasional swear. Then again, they barely seem to communicate all that well in Zone-standard English. You picked those things up over time by necessity, because those were the people you lived with. Maybe they frown on that kind of multilingual slang in the city. You wouldn't know.

The sun streams down from above, sharpening the thick, chemical smell of spray paint. In however many years you've been on this earth, you've smelled far more offensive things in the Zones. At this point, the reek hardly bothers you.

"What's a good word in Spanish? You know, to put on a car or something?" Kobra's asking you idly without looking at you, though you can't for the life of you figure out why he might want to know. You've seen him occasionally touch up the car's paint job, but only here and there. Not a full rehaul like this. You'd ask why he's asking this of you in particular, but you can guess - and it's not as though you don't have an answer. You consider several options.

_"Vaya."_

"What's that mean?"

"Go."

The corner of the Kid's mouth twitches.

"'Kay," he says. Then he tosses the can to you so abruptly that you nearly drop it. _"Vaya_ to town."

You stare at him. When no explanation is forthcoming, you clear your throat.

"...what?"

"You can spell it, right?" Kobra stretches, pops something in his neck, and starts walking for the station.

You suppose you do. When Kobra returns, you have the word outlined in red. He makes a faint sound of approval and grabs a can of yellow paint to start laying highlights over the letters, and you watch him do it.

"You're good with numbers and shit," says Kobra, as he works. He isn't looking at you, wholly focused on the lettering, but he isn't exactly speaking to anyone else. You don't think he's expecting an answer from that, and you're right. He keeps talking. "Like with the money back in Chow Mein's. If we had to split, like, a hundred c's twenty-eight ways - "

"Three each," you finish for him with a shrug. "Sixteen spare."

Kobra raises his eyebrows. You think he might be impressed with how quickly you answered, but that's not what he says when he speaks again:

"You learn that kinda thing in the city?"

His expression is almost wholly blank the way it usually is, but there's an undercurrent to the words you can't entirely dismiss, as though something crucial rides upon your answer. Like the Devil, Kobra's quick to assume you're from Battery City, because most out here are.

Your history's more complicated than that. You shake your head.

"No?" Kobra actually stops at that one, frowns up at you. He contemplates you quietly for several long moments. Then he blinks, and his expression recedes back into its familiar flatness. You're struck with the inexplicable impression that, somehow, you've managed to answer incorrectly. "...guess not."

He completes his work in silence, and doesn't broach the subject again. You and him wait by the car until Poison breezes back out, their hair brighter than a lit flare, and says it's time to redline the shit out of this dump.

None of you protest when Poison guns the engine, and soon you're all streaking out into the dust.

****

**\--**

**he's a honeyjar  
with that pretty face, let's never lose the lid**

**\--**

It's not all peaks and highs. The troughs are as low as they ever get in the Zones. You burn through batteries trying to keep exterminators off your backs, or scaring off waveheads that think you make for easy pickings. You pass through strips of the Zones ripe with radiation and thick with limeade, and have to spend entire days in your shields. Kobra's motorcycle helmet is one that he or someone else must have modified; aside from the bright yellow varnish and the words _GOOD LUCK_ that have been printed across its visor, it clearly protects him from the worst of the toxic fumes. Ghoul has a rubbery mask of purple and green made from a material reminds you of the make and polish of the masks they use to create draculoids, though you've never seen that colorful variant. Like draculoid masks, it must have some kind of built-in filter. Not to be outdone by either of them, Poison makes do with a massive, bluish monstrosity with wide eyes and a cartoonish smile and a thick hose running out from its mouth. You know you've seen it before, whatever character it's emulating, but it's no less unsettling to look at when it's person-sized and being worn on someone's head.

Your stolen scarecrow helmet with its built-in filters and painted-on lightning bolt fits right in. The Ghoul takes one look at it and starts calling you "spaceman." No amount of glaring or telling him to shut the fuck up gets him to stop.

The Zones are starting to murmur. They say BL/ind has its sights set on the desert. They say they have all sorts of monitoring systems. You knew about the satellites, scorching the cold vacuum of space as they hurtle to their destined crater in the dust, but the whispers are starting to point to other, more grounded methods. Drones hidden beneath the sand. Robotic mites the size of flies with mounted cameras and live feeds. You all take to swatting any bugs that get too close, just in case they happen to be a set of eyes for the BL/ind.

When it's not dodging dracs, it's steering clear of other roving bands of Zone-rats that don't think very much of you or the company you keep. The Kobra Kid gets separated from the group trying to draw away one particular crew. You don't find him until three days later, with several scabbed-over slashes dug into the meat of his back and upper arms, and a knife hilted in his arm, almost at the joint.

Poison swears they're going to murder every one of those Demon-Shark fucks. The Kid's in and out for another two days while you and Poison stitch and bandage every laceration you can find. The Sharks aren't done with him, either; they ambush you while you're camped out in the shell of some old house, waiting for the Ghoul to come back with the car and whatever medical supplies he could barter for. The Demon-Sharks shoot out what remains of the windows and shower the both of you with broken glass.

"Kobra. _Kobra._ C'mon, asshole," hisses Poison as they drop down next to their brother, who you've laid out on the ground. The firefight might as well not be raging along around you; they only have eyes for the Kid. He's still too pale and his pulse is too thready, and you don't want to have to be the one to tell Poison that their brother might very easily bleed to death on the floor.

"He needs blood," is all you say instead.

Poison immediately yanks up the sleeve of their jacket, creasing the navy leather, and holds out their arm. You can barely make out the blue threads of veins standing out against their dust-stained, sunburned skin.

"We're the same," says Poison. The words are level, but there's a desperation to how quickly they respond and how they hold your gaze now. _We're the same,_ they say, and you don't have to ask what that means. It's fortunate that it's the case; you're not sure how you'd gauge someone's blood type out here, especially in the middle of a clap.

You and Poison save Kobra's life - you by remembering how to tourniquet an arm and draw blood safely, and Poison by being a willing donor. Two weeks after, Kobra returns the favor by fucking up a couple of burners that take issue with your nearly all-black apparel while you're stopped off at some halfway bar.

The other three said they had contacts inside the place - a dilapidated, repurposed distillery with a rickety sign proclaiming it "the After Party" - that could offer some fair trades. You doubt you'd make much of a difference in a situation of that caliber, so you've chosen to keep watch, which is how some brightly colored crash queens start getting glitched off at you. They call black a death-shade and say that you're not a real Zone-rat if you're garbed up in a color-killer's costume. They don't shoot you, but they start talking about burning you alive while they proceed to kick the living shit out of you. You're outnumbered and one of their feet catches you under the chin hard enough to swarm your vision with white spots. They'd probably continue beating you senseless if it weren't for the Kobra Kid's intervention. He promptly shoots one in the knee, stuns another with a sharp strike to the solar plexus, and lays out the third with a spectacular left hook. He leaves them all groaning on the ground in the space of about twenty seconds. He's faster and more precise at taking out multiple targets in close quarters than anyone you've ever seen, even if he tears several of his stitches for his efforts. When Poison loudly berates him over the freshly oozing wounds, he only says that it was worth it.

Kobra's not the only one you have to stitch up. When a group of waveheads decide they don't like the look of the four of you, they slash up one of Ghoul's arms and try to steal his raygun while he's down. Poison sews him up during the ensuing firefight. You have to aid their efforts twice over when Ghoul stresses the injury by tinkering with the car and tearing the injury open again.

Ghoul has a way with cars, it turns out. He teaches you how to change the oil and what some of the blinking lights on the dash mean while the Kobra Kid splashes fresh coats of paint across the chassis and fixes letters to the sides. You glimpse a spidery, black word sprawled across one side - _DESTROYA_ \- and smile while Ghoul shows you how to check Trans Am's parts for wear and breakdown underneath the hood. Part of it is out of necessity, because Ghoul's not supposed to be messing with the car while his arm is still being knitted up, but you suspect part of it might be his way of issuing an apology for accidentally setting your hair on fire and then laughing while you tried, ineffectually, to beat the shit out of him for setting your hair on fire.

The interior looks like an incomprehensible swirl of tubes and wires and delicate parts that could come apart if you so much as touch the wrong thing, but Ghoul navigates the car's innards without even having to look at them. You know that to be why Poison lets him drive the car as often as he does. Poison does most of the driving, near as you can tell, but Ghoul easily spends the second most amount of time in the driver's seat.

"This bird's a pre-war _antique,"_ he says with an unmistakable air of pride. "But me and the Kid, we're the reason she can still run. Fixed her up special, see. Fastest ride in the Zones."

Like Ghoul, the Kobra Kid has a knack for piecing things together. His talents lie more with the discarded ephemera from old bits of broken machinery than the intricacies of a working engine, though he's capable of fixing a busted tailpipe or patching a crossover tube. When the filters on Poison's blue abomination of a helmet break down, Kobra's the one who fiddles with them until they're fixed.

You live out of the Trans Am, most days. It's a small space, and cramped, but two of you can sleep in it at a time when there's nowhere else to spend the night, and it's safer than sleeping on the ground in the open. You grow accustomed to catching the odd hour or two of sleep in the backseat while Poison's driving, because they're usually the one driving. Sometimes you wake and discover that Ghoul has begun to doze beside you, his head falling onto your shoulder, or that Kobra has started to snore faintly in your ear. 

It's not like Devil's presumptuous over-familiarity, or Rocket's unspoken need for someone to ground them with touch. It's accidental and the first few times it happens you're not sure what to make of it - that either of them feel at ease enough to fall asleep beside you.

When they slip lower, you adjust your posture incrementally so that they can sit a bit more comfortably against you. The weight of Ghoul's head against your shoulder or the touch of Kobra's arm to yours isn't, you gradually come to admit to yourself, entirely unwelcome.

Some days you wake with your head propped up against the Ghoul's. Sometimes he's asleep, but when he's not, his eyes flick up to you, briefly, and then away again as he lets them droop shut, as though there's nothing strange about any of it. He checks to see if you're awake and then doesn't say anything, doesn't feel the need to shove you away or tell you to stop leaning on him like he's your armrest. He never comments on it. He never does or says anything aside from simply letting it happen.

The same can't be said of Party Poison, who more often than not is the one driving the car and therefore the one who dozes the least. You're not sure when they sleep, actually. A part of you suspects that they _don't,_ absurd as the claim might be.

You're up sometimes, when they startle in their sleep and jolt awake. You can usually hear them twisting restlessly, getting up to pace, and then slinking off...somewhere. You don't always hear them when they return, and you don't know where it is they go - assuming they go anywhere.

You don't think you're the only one to have noticed it, but in true desert fashion, no one brings it up. You don't ask those kinds of questions out here. Most things stay forever buried unless there's a good reason to dig them up.

Party Poison is nonetheless consistently unswerving as they take all four of you from place to place, burning gas and dusting dracs. Whatever troubles them stays locked behind their calm, assessing gaze and their self-assured smirk. It gets them into trouble sometimes. More than once, you catch raised voices - Kobra or Ghoul taking issue with Poison's decision-making or with each other, and _loudly_ so. Kobra grabbing a fistful of Poison's shirt and dragging them close so that he can snap at them inches from their face, or kicking dust on Ghoul's boots and prompting a small fistfight. It's not always the big choices; mostly it's the little things. This route or that job. Whether they stop at this location or move on. It's a testament to the fire-forged nature of the trio that they trust each other unfailingly in some respects - to drive the car, to have their backs in a firefight - but don't hesitate to dredge up whatever ugly, underhanded thing they need to in an argument. It's easy enough to make yourself scarce when those fights inevitably arise; you can withdraw and do weapons checks or inventory or assess the Trans Am while everybody else butts heads over where they're going and why.

To you, it doesn't much matter where you go or why. What matters is the fact that you're moving. And the four of you are never stuck in one place for long. It pays to travel in a group - particularly this one, which opens certain doors that would otherwise be closed to you. Poison makes a stop at a drinking joint called the Cemetery Window for some reason or another, presumably to meet with a contact of theirs and Kobra's, which leaves you and Fun Ghoul to shoot the shit for a few hours.

Following your experience at the After Party, you're about ready to sit this one out. The Ghoul won't have it.

"C'_moooon,_ Jet," he says, wheedling. "They ain't gonna sell me nothin' if it's just _me._ I gotta have a plus-one." 

Clearly there's a history there. You relent, if only because the Ghoul lights up like flare once you do and quickly elbows his way inside, fingers tight around your wrist. You let him tow you into the dark, cramped interior. All manner of burners are piled on mismatched barstools and huddled around tables. The whole place reeks of alcohol and body sweat.

"All right, all right," mutters Ghoul, shouldering his way past a beefy crash queen with a mohawk so high it almost brushes the ceiling. "Gimme a sec here. If you want the good shit, the _really_ good shit off-menu, you gotta order in fuckin' Cantonese and it's been a minute."

By the time the two of you make it to the sunshine behind the counter, you're starting to feel like you might be a little too tall for this establishment. You're at least a few inches above most everyone in here, even the ones who are standing, and a full head taller than who you're presuming is the bartender. Ghoul doesn't seem to notice. He leans up on the counter on his elbows.

"Hey, hey," he says, cheerfully. "Lemme, um - _léuhng_, uh, _būi bējáu_. Right? 'S that it?"

The bartender deadeyes him.

"Fuckin' - y'know what I mean!" Ghoul flaps a hand in their direction. "Two bottles of Lighter Fluid. Y'know the stuff. 'S what I got last time. _Yámbūi,_ 'n all that."

You draw even with Ghoul so that you stand up shoulder-to-shoulder with him. You've started to learn that if you stand there and _stare_ at whoever's harassing one of the crew, pretty soon they shut up. This one's not talking, but eventually they seem to get antsy enough beneath the strength of your flat gaze to reach underneath the bar and withdraw two bottles so they can lever the caps off and pass them to Ghoul. The Ghoul grins and slaps a couple c's onto the counter.

_"M̀h'gōi!"_ he says with an overt cheer. You have no idea what that means, but you assume it's something along the lines of _thank you._ He looks about ready to head out when he freezes and frowns intently, as though listening to something. Then he twists around and stares at the radio perched on a shelf behind the bartender. It's unobjectionable, as far as you can tell, but the Ghoul's expression starts to mist over.

Then, abruptly, it snaps into blunt outrage.

"Turn that shit off," he says to the bartender.

They understandably ignore him.

"Hey. _Turn it off,"_ he says again. "Change the channel. Something. _Something."_

The bartender reaches over without acknowledging Ghoul in the slightest and cranks up the volume. You catch the strains of music layered over someone's voice - you recognize some of the words, but it's not English.

_"Eien to ikitai - "_ says the voice on the radio. The increase in volume only serves to incense the Ghoul further. You watch his expression go livid, seemingly without warning, and he cuts off whatever's meant to come spilling out from the static with a frustrated yell. A few patrons are starting to glance his way and shuffle back.

"Y'hear me?" snarls Ghoul. "Turn that fuckin' - " He lunges at the counter as though he's about to swipe the radio off the shelf, and that _finally_ gets a reaction out of the sunshine on the other side.

You catch their glower and the way it's hedging close to _nuclear,_ so you hastily loop one arm around Ghoul's shoulders and drag him back. His muscles are taut and trembling beneath your grip as he fights to throw you off, his expression tight and murderous.

"Thanks," you say to the bartender, who has done next to nothing to deserve this, you're pretty sure, and lean closer to Ghoul's ear. "Drinks?"

Ghoul breathes hard for a few seconds longer. His hands open and close into fists, rapidly. Then, without any warning whatsoever, he relaxes in your grip. You stumble a little as he slumps against you for a minute, breathing hard.

"Yeah," he says quietly. You almost don't catch it over the background chatter. "Yeah. Fuck it. Let's get outta here."

You let him duck out from your arms only when it becomes apparent that he's not about to do anything that might get you both permanently barred from this place. He shoots one last black look at the radio on the shelf, then snatches up the pair of bottles and starts navigating his way back out.

It's cooler outside, and not just because it's evening. The sky is only barely starting to light up with the faded, smokescreened stippling of stars overhead. You can breathe easier out here, underneath the spread of the night. You think Ghoul can too. The crowd didn't necessarily bother you on principle, but there are too many unknown variables in a situation like that one. Too many people who you can't predict, and too many faces you don't recognize.

"Little bitch," mutters Ghoul, and you don't think he's talking about the bartender or you. You watch him knock back a long swallow of whatever's in his bottle, shake the hair from his face, and sit with a bump on the sand with his back against the Trans Am. _"Shit_. That's the fuckin' stuff."

You haven't tasted whatever it is he's bought you. You're pretty sure it's not actually lighter fluid, but you're not one hundred percent on that since guzzling lighter fluid seems like the sort of thing that Ghoul would do anyway. A tentative sip reveals that it's something bitter and chemical and alcoholic. It burns on the way down.

The moniker of "Lighter Fluid" turns out to be an accurate one. It's an acquired taste, maybe. You sit down next to Ghoul anyway.

"'S good, right?" says Ghoul. He's not looking at you. You shrug, and take another sip. "Yeah," he continues, as though you've verbally agreed. "Kerosene makes it best. They're a little prick but, y'know, they make good shit, so whatever."

He sucks down another long draught. You run your thumb around the rim of your bottle. It's sweating from the condensation, drops sparkling in the half-light against the dark brown glass.

"Place has been out here forever." You let Ghoul talk. You're pretty sure his blood's still running hot, and this seems to be cooling him down some. "Think it might'a been an old diner or somethin'. I dunno. They won't tell me shit. Broke a bottle over some asshole's head last time I was there, so now they say I gotta have supervision anytime I stop 'round."

None of this remotely surprises you.

"Motherfucker deserved it, though," says Ghoul. The words are a little muffled, his mouth on the lip of his bottle. "Actin' like he _invented_ livin' out here. Y'know people used to live out in the desert _before_ it all went to hell?"

You shrug. You'd figured as much.

"But _nah,_ people're gonna act like that didn't happen," he mutters. "Like they can just wipe it all away. Bleach it all to a crisp in Bat City! Fuck 'em." Another drink. He switches his grip on his bottle. You watch the ink laid into his skin shift beneath the delicate muscles and tendons in his hand as it closes around the glass. There are letters on each finger, dark against skin just beneath his knuckles. On one hand: _F-U-C-K_. On the other: _S-H-I-T_.

You're not surprised at this either. It suits him.

"They don't let you speak in any other languages or shit in there," he says. "In the city. Teach everything in English 'n Japanese or _both,_ 'n if you don't like it, y'can get _fucked."_

He can only be telling you this if he's guessed, rightly, that you're not from the city. You're not sure when you ever might have indicated this to him, but maybe it's something intangible to you. Something obvious to him.

You try another swig of your drink. It tastes like something that someone might have strained out of a leaking car - like nuclear-fried battery acid.

"Then you come out here," Ghoul's saying, soft, "and everybody speaks _everything._ You spend a year out here, y'start to pick up on it. So now I know, uh, _un poco Español,_ y'know?"

He nudges you with the angle of his elbow and grins.

"Not as much as you do, I bet. I catch you slippin' up sometimes, y'know. _Everybody_ does, you big motherfuck."

He continues to stare at you. 

You know by now that this is how Ghoul expresses affection - with sharp words filed into points and a casual nastiness that's more or less his baseline. You've begun to grow accustomed to gauging his moods from that line, and no other. It's because you recognize this that you can respond in turn.

You snort and knock back another swallow of your Lighter Fluid. _"Cállate."_

You know he understands _that_ one. Ghoul barks out a laugh at that, harsh and guttural.

_"Ha!_ All right, all right."

The name of "lighter fluid" proves to be potent in more than one sense. You're only halfway through your bottle when the pleasant buzz starts to tingle the tips of your fingers, swelling your chest with an artificial warmth. The Ghoul finishes his with a final gulp and tosses his empty bottle into the sand before collapsing back onto the ground, face-up.

"I tell you, spaceman," he says, "we're all gonna burn out like fuckin' comets. Gonna crash like satellites. Burn it all the fuck down. Y'know what I mean?"

Evidently, being intoxicated doesn't cut down on Ghoul's ability to heap words into your silence. On the contrary, he seems to grow more talkative when drunk.

"Witch 's gonna come for our souls." He starts patting down the front of his vest, rooting about in his pockets. He finally extricates a crumpled box of cigarettes and offers it out to you. You shake your head. He fumbles with his lighter for several long seconds, probably struggling to calibrate his newly-lax muscles into operating with the precision required of them. "Bet She'll pack me up in pieces, man."

You reach over, pluck Ghoul's lighter from his hands, and set the end of his cigarette aflame for him.

"Thanks, spaceman." He accepts his nic-stick from you gratefully and sticks it between his lips with a sigh. "Y'got steady hands. Anybody ever tell you that?"

"Never," you deadpan.

Ghoul laughs. _"Ha ha,_ yeah, I bet. Witch watchin' your back or somethin'?"

You pick at the bad luck beads on your wrist. The alcohol in your veins is making it harder to focus on them. Their silhouettes blur out if you don't concentrate on the smoothness of the wood and the dark symbols laid into each of them.

"Maybe," you say, frowning. It's not something you've ever admitted out loud - that you've suspected _something_ is guiding the direction of your path so that you continue to survive the things that should, by all rights, have killed you. At this point, you're not sure how much you appreciate the intervention. Dying is so much easier than living. Especially out here.

Perhaps you haven't been trying hard enough.

"Bet you She is." You look down at Ghoul and find that he's grinning with his eyes shut. He has his cigarette pinched between two fingers, wrist to his forehead.

This situation is getting too familiar.

"Hey. Hey, Jet?" Ghoul cracks his eyes open and looks at you. "If I go first - you'll take me to Her, right? You'll take me to Her even if I get blown to shit, right?"

Maybe it's because he's drunk and lying on the ground. It's probably the liquor that's loosened his tongue and made him more likely to ask questions like those. But there's an ache of sincerity in the words, like the Lighter Fluid has scraped away his sharpened veneer and left something raw beneath. He looks at you like he means it.

You're trying not to think about drinking sugar and caffeine under the stars while someone asked if you'd see her off to the Witch. You're trying not to think of the last time someone begged something similar of you, and cursed you out when you refused. You're not thinking of how she died after that - how a lot of people have died, by now, and how you could not ferry all of them to the Witch's keeping.

What you should say is: _no._ What you should say is: _I can try._ What you _should_ say is any number of things, none of which hinge upon making a promise that you cannot guarantee that you will be able to keep. It's a testament to the potency of the alcohol that you're drinking that you don't. That, or it's a testament to _you,_ and your inability to turn aside a request like that one.

Instead you say, "yeah," and it's so quiet that you're not sure that Ghoul's heard it until he answers.

"Y'sure?"

He's not letting you go so easily. You force a swallow of your horrible, _incredibly_ potent liquor and answer again. 

"Yeah."

"Even if y'gotta do it in pieces? Like, what if - _ha haaa,_ what if y'gotta put me in a box or in like, in like a shopping cart, just t'carry all the pieces? Even then?"

"Yeah."

"Like, what if y'gotta carry me in a _bucket?_ What if I'm just _bits?_ How y'gonna do that, huh?"

The grisly specifics should bother you. But they shave away the strain and profundity of what he's asking - makes it paradoxically easier to stomach, until the conversation feels like a joke rather than an oath. So you answer in kind:

"Because I said so."

Silence.

Then the Ghoul smiles lazily, and his eyes droop shut.

"Thanks, brother."

His eyes are closed, so hopefully he doesn't notice when you shiver at the word, and promptly hide it in a swig from a bottle.

You gauge the pressure of the word and your promise, clenched just beneath your sternum. It's needles and expectation and warmth. It pinches like some part of you is already bracing itself to weather the loss of another soul you could not save.

It's easier to think past it if you tell yourself that it's the alcohol. Nothing more.

****

**\--**

**and keep those rosy lips in  
(he breathes wet through insect eyes)**

**\--**

While Dust Devil had insisted on keeping the radio on almost constantly, hingeing everything on having a constant line open to the world of the Zones and what was happening all throughout the desert, this is the first time you've traveled with people who have an intermittent communication line with one DJ in particular.

"D was askin' after us," says Kobra one evening, busy piecing together some gadget or another. You have no idea what the hell he's doing, actually, but whatever it is, it involves a lot of wires and some white plastic casing that probably used to belong to something owned by BLi.

"'S that so?" drawls Poison without looking up from the pieces of their gun as they clean and repaint it.

"Said on the morning's broadcast. Askin' for two shots of snake venom and caffeine tablets."

That's probably a code. _Snake venom_ \- that'd have to refer to the two of them, wouldn't it? A Kobra and whatever Poison it pumps through another person's veins.

"D?" says Ghoul. You can tell by his squint that he's as lost as you are. It's hard to suppress the resultant stab of relief that you're not the only one who is, on occasion, caught off guard by the obvious routine and synchronicity between Poison and their brother. Oftentimes, _too_ often, Ghoul has a synergy with the both of them that leaves you feeling like an inconsistency, an instability, a loose bolt rattling in a complete and well-oiled machine.

"Dr. Death," says Kobra. "The DJ. We check up on him sometimes."

Dr. Death, likely as in Dr. Death Defying. Your head is angled away from the conversation since you're trying to light up the fire before the temp drops to freezing, but you're not certain if the recognition shows on your face anyway. After however many years it's been, would he even remember you? You doubt it.

You take your lower lip between your teeth, scowling at the heaped dead twigs and brush. You've built and lit enough fires to have a knack for it by now, but none of the sparks you've managed to produce are sticking. You'd rather not douse the whole thing in gasoline and be done with it; while it might get a merry blaze going, it'll burn through the fuel you've amassed fast.

"Huh," Ghoul says, but his expression is shadowed. "You check up on him?"

Poison only shrugs.

"Yeah. He helps us out, we help him out. 'S a thing we do."

They seem content to leave the explanation at that, though Ghoul still looks skeptical. He catches your eye when you look his way, and he grimaces at you. You're not sure you can gather the reasoning behind that sentiment, or why this relationship with Dr. Death Defying is an arrangement that's presumably been in place for some time. How far back do Poison and their brother go with Dr. Death? Do they know him _well?_ They must know him well _enough._

"Caffeine, though?" Kobra makes a face. "I can't see us gettin' that from anybody, 'cept maybe Tommy. And he'll probably fuckin' stiff us for it."

"Maybe not," says Poison slowly. "I'm thinkin' we're overdue for a run anyway. Could use the extra food 'n bat packs."

You choose that moment to stand up, momentarily abandoning your efforts to spark your cairn of desert brush alight. The act alone is enough to draw everyone's gaze to you, and you look at them with your eyebrows raised and the question plain on your face.

There's only a brief pause in the conversation before Poison turns to face you.

"We do runs on city supply lines sometimes," they say, noncommittal. "Nice 'n easy, usually. Free supplies, 'n we can sell whatever we don't need. City ain't been able to stop us yet."

You're not entirely certain you succeed in smoothing away the expression of reflexive horror.

None of them seem worried about this.

"Oh," is all you have to say to that, but what you really mean is that you know how this kind of story ends.

You'd known this was coming, you have to tell yourself repeatedly. You have outlived two crews in their entirety, and that isn't about to change. Your mistake was in getting attached in the first place. You chose to stay with them, even knowing that it would only end in the same way it always has. You don't want to be the one to tell Party Poison that they should rethink their strategy and start with choosing _not_ to make a dangerous, potentially suicidal run on heavily guarded and well-armored BLi supply trucks, not when they talk tactics with the ease and confidence of someone who's done this several times before. Maybe they have. The Kobra Kid certainly acts like this is nothing new, and even the Ghoul seems accustomed to falling in line with a plan of this caliber. You're not so sure you can trust that, see, because Poison has an unshakable air of self-assurance about everything and not just doomed, inevitably destructive raids on the forces that BL/ind has at its infinite disposal. You're certain that if you try saying anything, it'll net you little more than accusing stares and confusion and, worse, laughter at your palpable doubt that this could succeed. You don't have the words to explain that you've watched south of a dozen zonerunners have their numbers halved because even their conjoined forces weren't enough to steal from BLi. You don't have the words to explain that you've fed more masks to mailboxes than you have room for in your soul, and you don't want to have to carry three more souls along with you when this effort fails and they all die and you're left alive, because you are always, _always_ left alive.

What right do you have to protest? You knew this was coming. You _knew_ this would happen because this was the risk you took when you started running with them.

Poison rattles off strategy and talks about positions and timing and you barely catch a word of it. Ghoul asks you what's wrong, if you're scared of a couple dracs. He's clearly joking as he says it, but you can't trim the edge off your glare fast enough, and you watch his grin sharpen. It doesn't seem to matter _what_ reaction he's getting from people, you realize, as long as he _gets_ one. If Poison notices the ice to your answering glower, they don't comment on it. They simply keep talking.

That night, you can't shut your eyes for the nervous energy burning in your blood. You give up on sleep and head outside. The old building that the group has chosen to hide out in offers minimal shelter against the cold, so it's no great loss if you have to pace out in the open.

Turning in anxious loops is doing nothing to calm the tension clenching your jaw and simmering in your veins. Your breath frosts out in thick plumes of white. You turn away from the dark, slender shape of the Trans Am parked in the dust, close your eyes and remember: the sun glinting off keys as they sailed in a high arc over your head, winking in your palm when you caught them, still warm from someone else's pocket.

The memory leaves a tautness in your throat. You stare out at the darkened sky, at the stretches of Zone Two sprawling out and out and out until they're swallowed by distance and by lack of light. A sliver of moon hangs milk-pale in the sky, almost completely mantled by cloud cover.

You could run.

That's the one thing you're still good at.

You could run and leave them to their fate, and let them decide what they would of that. The Ghoul, at least, would be able to tell the other two that he's been expecting it. He made the offer to you, inasmuch as it could be considered an _offer._ He said he wouldn't tell, but that was before you rode with them and fought beside them and slept in the same car as them. You've eaten their food and shared their carbons and they've grinned alongside you and argued about music and done stupid shit just to coax a laugh out of you. That was before Kobra thanked you for saving his ass, before Ghoul drowsed with his head slumped against your shoulder, before Poison argued with you about Mad Gear's discography.

In the same instant you consider it, you know that you can't.

You can't run because if they go in tomorrow and they die, you know it'll be your fault. Because you have a steady shot and you are an unshakable pair of hands and you can run faster than anyone in the Zones, and if they're down a man tomorrow, it'll be because you weren't there. It'll be because you weren't there to pick off an exterminator that gets a lucky shot in, or a drac that yanks a mask over one of their faces, or Destroya forbid, a scarecrow that chokes one of them to death with its bare hands. You can already picture the trio of bodybags, smoking slightly underneath the sun - color locked up behind a zipper and carbon-plastic.

The night air is cold and biting. You fold your arms across your chest, jam your fingers underneath your armpits, and bounce slightly on the spot. It doesn't help, but it lends you the illusion that you're doing _something_ instead of sitting in one place and waiting for the Witch to come for one or all of you. 

A quiet curse pulls at your attention from around the side of the building's remnants. It's impossible to tell what this place might have once been, though you think it was probably a shed or a house. It's too small to have been anything commercial. You creep around what remains of the corner with your hand on your gun, only to stop when you realize it's just Ghoul, hunkered down over something in his hands beside the fire's dying embers. He looks up sharply when you draw near. His hand springs to his gun a second before he recognizes you, you assume, because his whole frame relaxes and he laughs quietly.

"Hey, spaceman," he says idly, possibly because he knows it'll annoy you. "Can't sleep?"

You shake your head as you step wearily near, crouch down across from him. You blow on the embers slightly to stir them awake.

"Y'don't gotta worry," says Ghoul. His eyes are on whatever's in his hands. It looks like a nest of wires and black casing. You have no notion as to what it's supposed to be. "Poison's a pro at this. They been doin' this shit since it was just them 'n Kobra."

Just the two of them?

Ghoul's not paying attention to the skepticism that must be stark on your features. He's too busy doing...whatever it is he's doing with his bundle of wires and parts.

"Just puttin' it out there. We get a little fucked up from it, sure, but 's always worth it. Don't gotta worry or nothin'." That probably sounded more reassuring in his head than it does out loud. "I'm tellin' you 'cause you seemed pretty tense earlier, and I'm just sayin' you don't gotta worry, see? I seen 'em both make it work before."

If by "tense" you mean that you shot him a glower because he cracked a joke, then you suppose that he'd be correct there. You shift on the spot guiltily, but Ghoul still isn't looking at you. You're not sure how to go about apologizing for something like that, particularly when Ghoul isn't acknowledging it in all but the most roundabout sense.

You hum a noncommittal answer regardless, and hunch down lower over the crumbs of the cinders still swirling in the fire-pit and blow a bit harder. You're rewarded by an answering, reddish glow.

It's not enough. You sit back on your heels with a sigh.

"'S okay," says Ghoul. "'M almost done here."

He finally meets your eyes when you look at him, and reads the inquiry in them. His grin is visible even in the midnight dimness.

"'S a bomb," he says, with no small amount of pride. He holds up the thing, and you can see now that there's a light on one side that's blinking faintly. "Never know when one'a these things can come in handy, y'know. Easy as shit t'put together too. Old limeade canisters, they're all over the place and they got the perfect structure for it."

You didn't know he was a detonator. Your surprise must show on your face, because Ghoul abruptly winks at you.

"What?" he says, with artless poise. "More'n just a pretty face."

In spite of your best efforts, you feel it: the inexplicable tug of a smile crimping one side of your face. Not even ducking your head can hide it from him, and Ghoul snickers.

"Yeah," he says. "We'll all be just milkshake."

You don't want tomorrow to be the last time you see any of them. You don't want this night to be the last conversation you have with Ghoul, even if he grins toothily at his success when he makes you huff out a partial laugh.

Your hand is on your gun. Too many times, what happens has been on your shoulders: not fast enough, not sharp enough. You've been injured and required someone else's help and that help got them killed. You didn't follow orders to the letter and you didn't follow them fast enough and it got someone ghosted. 

If it comes down to it, you'll be the only casualty that they have tomorrow.

That's the one power you have - to make sure that it won't be any of them. If it has to be someone, it'll be you.

You'll hold yourself to that.

****

**\--**

**in multiples of four  
no less than sixteen**

**\--**

Party Poison is a bolt of searing red against the desert sand. They move fast, sharp, and resolute. They run and you follow them. They make it easy. You're at their heels as they skid over the loose sand, shooting. It's just you and them, and they asked for you because you have the sharpest eyes and you're the best shot they have, so of course when they asked if you'd take point with them, you said yes.

Better you than anyone else.

The supply convoy is dead ahead. It's one truck and a train of motorcycles and at least two cars, all stark and white and nested in the tan plateau of Zone One. It's a lot of dracs, though. A lot of exterminators. A lot of numbers stacked against the four of you. There really are only fucking four of you.

Poison doesn't breathe a word to you. Instead they fill their lungs and belt, loud as anything:

"Hey, bitch-faces! Look alive!"

And then they start shooting.

You suppose that's where everything else about them comes in handy. Their hair, their fervency, their volume, the unapologetic brashness to everything they do. They pull at everyone's eyes when they draw near. They're a flare in the sky, bolder and brighter than anything in the desert. Intentional or not, they're smart enough to use that to their advantage.

It doesn't hurt that they seem to relish the attention, even if most of it currently takes the form of laser blasts.

You know intimately the color of chaos. It's lightning-bright and jags behind your lids with every blink.

You don't think of Haywire - the way that everything about her courted destruction, until her burning out and up was little more than an inevitability. You don't think of how she ended up dusted long and slow instead of fast and fiery.

You don't have the time for that.

Poison drops into a kneel before they get too close to their targets, and you do the same. Your job is to pick off as many of them as you can from a distance, so you do that. You focus on this, and little else: just your knee dug into the sand and the rhythm of your heart and the bracing pull of the trigger and the high, shrieking _zzzt_ of a laser rending the hundred-degree air. Poison's not as good a shot as you are; no one is. Their bolts don't hit as consistently, but they do manage to get the attention of several dracs that you promptly cut down.

When their gun's battery chimes low, they shuck it in one smooth motion, slap in a new pack, and stand. Their hands catch your shoulder in a fluid close, tugging you back. You follow them. Now you're both in retreat as more and more of the exterminators gathered around the supply truck start to peel away to fire on the pair of agitators, which is exactly what Poison wanted. They're returning fire at an increased rate. You're quick to drop behind an outcropping of rock as fresh blasts of plasma buzz overhead. They powder the ground around you with shards of smoke and stone on impact.

Poison is still up and shooting. Their concentration is singleminded and their expression has split into a vicious grin. After a streak of plasma buzzes dangerously close to their knee, it becomes readily apparent that they're not seeking out cover.

You seize a fistful of their jacket and haul them down behind the rock beside you. They flail in a way that seems instinctive, snapping out of your grip the instant they can.

"Don't fuckin' _touch_ me," Poison hisses. 

It's much more apparent, now, why Ghoul makes a point of _asking_ before he touches you.

You hold up both hands, palms out in surrender, but you're certain that your frustration is evident on your face. The exterminators are getting closer. If Poison had stood out there for any longer, there's little doubt that they would've gotten vaporized.

They shake the hair from their eyes, recovering quickly, peer out from around your shared impromptu cover, and drop back when a shower of laser fire nearly takes off their head.

"We gotta keep movin'," says Poison. "We stay, they'll pin us down. Point is to draw 'em _away."_

You know that. Do they think you don't know that?

They don't give you time to so much as glare. They're up and moving again, leading the exterminators with their fire while making for the crest of the nearest incline. Keeping them honest. You follow, only pausing to shoot off a couple more times. You clip one exterminator on the arm and floor another with a shot to the torso, and then you're running. The further away you kite them from the truck, the less likely they are to follow, so it's important that you continue to escalate your threat level whenever possible. According to Poison, trying to lead them all away is going to increase the pace of the truck's procession into the city, which is where Kobra and Ghoul come in.

You're ready for the _boom_ when it shakes the ground under your feet and belches a plume of smoke into the sky. To you, the sound is blinding teal. When the exterminators in pursuit quickly turn to glance back at the disruption, you and Poison promptly clear them out.

"Circle 'round," says Poison in your ear, as if you need the instruction. You follow regardless. You're not so stupid as to retread the same ground that you've just passed - you might have been thorough in wiping a handful of exterminators off the map, but that's no guarantee that some of them could be playing dead and keen to get their hands on you.

When you re-enter the scene, the front of the supply truck is crumpled like it's just been in a crash, and its innards are steaming furiously. Kobra rips a drac from one of the white-painted cars, shoots it, and clambers in the front seat to park the thing in front of the truck, presumably to keep anyone from trying to drive the target away. Ghoul is leaning out of the driver's seat of the Trans Am, taking shots when he can to pick off any dracs that might be trying to get the drop on Kobra from behind.

Poison shoots out a drac's legs a heartbeat before it riddles you with laser fire, then fells a second slinking for your back. You snipe the drac that tries to bludgeon the back of their head in gratitude. Ghoul fires off another bolt of plasma and squints at the horizon, at the white walls of Battery City looming large in the distance. You'd wager that, like you, Ghoul associates Zone One with firefights. The hazy color of the sky and the reflective glare of the city on the horizon remind you of getting shot at.

"Think we might'a been had," Kobra says shortly, following his gaze. "One'a these dracs gotta few words into their radio before we totaled 'em. Better move fast."

"Don't I always?" Poison grins in that moment, and looking at them now, you'd never know that they were struggling out of your grip earlier with an almost frenetic desperation. Their smirk is one of savage triumph. They bound over to the truck and kick it open. It there's a locking mechanism keeping it shut, it's either failed or been disabled; you don't know which. Instead you preoccupy yourself dusting an exterminator that's trying to crawl through the dirt for one of their motorcycles.

Poison's faster than you expect them to be. Soon they're racing past you with a crate in hand. 

"Trunk!" they bark. Kobra yanks it open, and Poison tosses the thing inside with practiced ease. "Drive!"

You blink in surprise as you retreat back to the Trans Am. They weren't lying when they said that they were going to move fast. You're just not sure all this effort was worth it for one box of supplies, whatever those supplies may be. If you took down an entire truck, isn't it in your best interest to strip it of everything you can get your hands on?

There's no time to question it. You move for the car as Ghoul guns the engine.

"Aw, fuck," mutters Kobra. "Crows're here."

The word boils an automatic pulse of dread from the pit of your stomach.

You glance up and you see it, getting steadily closer: a tight formation of dark motorcycles, their silhouettes distorted by heatwaves but drawing inexorably closer with the roar of engines. Immediately, raygun fire starts to hiss at the four of you. For a second time, you snag the back of Poison's _chamarra_ and yank them behind the Trans Am for cover, and not a moment too soon when a laser bolt singes the roof of the car.

Poison darts you a cold look, but you don't have time to decode whatever other meaning they might have intended to place behind it, and you don't care. You're a little too focused on crawling into the backseat with Kobra at your back. Ghoul lays down cover fire while Poison hauls ass into the passenger seat, and without hesitation, Ghoul floors the gas and the car rockets forward.

You have to take a moment. You have to take a moment to lean back in your seat and breathe out because your heart is going at a thousand miles a minute and the stench of ozone and the sight of the freshly wrecked truck and the smell of the sizzling corpses on the ground are all too clear in your head. You're fine. You check yourself for injuries and you're fine. You look at Kobra, try to get a read on Poison and Ghoul in the front seat, but they seem fine. They're silent, but they're not groaning or swearing or clutching any parts of their bodies that might have gotten shot or bruised or incinerated. You just participated in a theft and bombing of a BLi supply truck and came away with a fresh crate of supplies and _you're fine._

It doesn't feel like you should be. You're shaking. You can _feel_ yourself shaking and your breath jolting unevenly in your chest. Kobra ducks out of the open window in the backseat, half-standing at an awkward angle as he cranes out to fire at your pursuers.

"Jet!" Poison snaps at you. Their voice is growing increasingly distant. You can see their eyes in the mirror, but their words are thick and sluggish, as though being spoken through a dense fog. The viscosity of the air seems to have increased and you _can't_ \- 

"Jet." Kobra's sat back down next to you now. You missed when that happened. "They hit you? The fuck's going _on - "_

_The fuck's going on?_ You can't say. You can barely focus on him, on his eyes drilling into yours. His hand comes up against your cheek and cups your jaw for half a second. Then he slaps at your face very lightly, as though trying to jar you back into reality. You're breathing too fast. You're breathing too fast and your chest is starting to ache. You can feel Kobra running hands down your arms, flipping back the folds of your jacket, trying to figure out where you've been hit, because he thinks you're hurt. You'd have to be hurt to have been rendered completely _useless_ like this. The echoing, electrical whine of gunfire is fading out behind you, but you still feel like you're drifting a few inches to the left of yourself, like you're watching everyone else watching you. The colors in your head are all fogging up and you can't say _why._

" - gone into shock or something, I dunno," Kobra's saying. Again, you do your best to focus on him, on the darting of his eyes to the front seat and then back to you. 

It's difficult to look at him. It's difficult to focus at all, but even worse is trying to _look_ at him when he's staring at you with such open and honest concern. You're not built for this, you're certain. You weren't made to be pitied and you don't know how to be and you're not sure you like it.

You compensate by biting down on the skin of your wrist hard enough to tear skin.

"Hey!" Someone grabs your hand away. You can taste copper on your tongue. It grounds you. It _wakes_ you. "What the hell. You're _fine."_

You don't really think you are, but there's no evidence to support this.

"Can't stop right now. Gotta outrun those scarecrow fucks first." Kobra jerks his head in the vague direction of the roar of motorcycles at your backs. His expression scrunches up briefly, then smooths. "Were you _hit?"_

He doesn't seem to expect you to respond verbally, so you shake your head.

"'Kay." The word's still mired in confusion, but now he's rubbing his hand up and down one of your arms in a gesture that seems mostly unconscious. It's hard to say. You shut your eyes, and he keeps rubbing at your arm in a steady, rhythmic drag that eventually starts to slow the ragged tempo of your breathing.

"What the fuck is wrong with him?" snarls Poison in the front seat. "If he ain't hit, what's he _doing?_ We need someone to cover our six."

You're inclined to agree with Party Poison: what the fuck _is_ wrong with you?

"We're clear, Poison," says Kobra.

"We're clear when I say we're clear."

"Fuck off." The words are distracted and Kobra doesn't even look at them when he says it.

It's not as though Poison doesn't have a point. What the fuck _is_ wrong with you? It doesn't make sense. _None_ of it makes any sense. What sort of person keeps it together throughout a whole firefight but falls apart because things happen to go _well?_ There's a numbness in your fingers and in your hands and you have to close your eyes because if you keep looking forward, staring at Kobra as he stares at _you,_ you think you're going to be sick.

There's a lurch in your guts regardless.

"Oh," says Kobra, the word slow with trepidation, like someone who's realized something they don't want to consider.

"If he ruins the fuckin' car, I'm beating his ass." Poison again.

(But, no. You remember the last time you sat in the back of a car while someone leaked their insides onto the floor of it at your feet. You remember how to swallow the reflexive surge of bile in the back of your throat. You remember how to keep the nausea at bay.)

You keep your eyes shut and count backwards by nine from five thousand. You always pick nine now because nine's the number of people whose faces are seared into your fucking memory - the number of people that you've hurt and worse, just for you having been there. You don't think of satellites and you don't think of raygun burns and you don't think of scarecrows. There's nothing so utterly and fundamentally neutral as the concept of numbers so you concentrate solely on them now. You count back by nine.

You twist the beads around your wrist. Three times in rapid succession.

You count back by nine. 

Four thousand eight hundred and eleven.

" - not gonna fuckin' puke on your floor, Poison, _Christ,"_ says Kobra, his irritation palpable.

"I don't care. If he starts spittin' chunks, I'm kickin' him out."

Four thousand six hundred and sixty-seven.

"Will you shut it, Party?" Ghoul in the driver's seat. "We get it. You gotta love affair with your car, and who doesn't? It's very fuckin' sexy, 'n all."

Four thousand six hundred and fifty-eight.

"I'm just sayin', who hasn't thought of stickin' their dick in a car like this one?"

"Fuckin' - _uzai,_ will you? Fuck's sake, I'm never lettin' you take her out again."

You twist the beads around your wrist.

"Nothin's stoppin' you from marryin' the damn thing, Party. 'S that what y'do when we're all asleep? You go whisperin' sweet nothings into her tailpipe?"

Four thousand and seventy-three.

"If you hurt my car, I'm breakin' your fuckin' _arm,_ Ghoul. Quit driving like a _maniac."_

"The Trans Am and me is purely platonic, Party."

"Shut the fuck up."

Three thousand six hundred and twenty-three.

The sound of someone jostling in the front seat, and a loud, laughing yelp.

Three thousand five hundred and sixty.

"I'm just puttin' it out there," Ghoul is saying, "if you're so hung up on our scarecrow buddies, _you_ go shootin' off at our six. 'S not like it's hard."

Three thousand two hundred and eighty-one.

"He ain't hurt or anything. I checked."

"So what the fuck's his _problem?"_

Two thousand nine hundred and thirty.

The car shudders.

"Oops," says Ghoul.

"God damn it Ghoul, what did I _just fucking say."_

You've reached one thousand one hundred and forty-nine by the time the Trans Am coasts to a gradual stop. By then, you no longer feel like you're about to retch your stomach lining onto the floor of the backseat, and just about all of the heated arguing has faded into out-and-out silence. There's only static on the radio, and no longer does the roar of motorcycles herald scarecrows at your back. By now it looks to be the early evening, the sunset spilling watercolors out into the sky near the edge of the Zones, as Ghoul parks the car outside some old structure that looks like it's barely standing. It's all rickety wood and a caved-in roof and you feel you wouldn't be remiss for guessing that stopping here had more to do with using it as a landmark than for anything in the way of shelter.

Kobra keeps glancing at you as you step out of the car and shakily plant your feet on solid ground, but he doesn't say anything. Neither, it turns out, do any of the rest. They'd much rather unpack and inventory the spoils of their raid. You sit down against the wall of the building and breathe your way through what remains of the queasy rocking in your guts as you count the rest of the way down to zero.

When you open your eyes, Kobra's standing guard at the Trans Am's back while the Ghoul grows ever louder in his disgust with their pickings.

"Protein, protein, protein," he mutters, digging through the box of supplies liberated from BLi. He picks up a white can with the familiar, blankly happy logo printed across the front and tosses it back into the box with a noise of disgust. "Fuckin' _shitloads_ of dog food, though. You know how to pick 'em, Party."

"Had to move fast," says Poison, waspish. "Always do. 'S what I could grab, so that's what we _got."_

"Nobody's gonna trade caffeine _anything_ for a crate full'a PowerPup," says Ghoul. "Th'fuck does Bat City even _need_ this much dog food for? Swear to god, every time we get shit off their trucks, it's half _PowerPup."_

"For their dogs," says Kobra, but the words are so quiet you're not sure anyone's heard them.

"No fuckin' _shit,"_ says Ghoul, with disproportionate venom.

Kobra stuffs his hands into his pockets and doesn't say anything else. His expression is more reserved than usual. He's not even looking at you, like he didn't just help talk you down from the verge of - _something_ back in the car. You watch him as he continues to not respond to anything else while the conversation between Poison and Ghoul escalates into something more akin to an argument.

"We're heading to D's," says Poison with an unmistakable air of finality. "If we don't got his caffeine, he'll have to buy it off Tommy or some other fuck. We ain't peddling shit in the Zones here."

"You couldn't'a gone lookin' for _batteries?"_ Ghoul grouses without the slightest hint of a response as to what Poison's just said. "You couldn't'a gone lookin' for literally _anything_ we could actually use? Nah, just a fuckton of dog food dinner. Fuck, I _love_ runnin' with this fuckin' shit crew, Party, I really fuckin' - "

Poison hits him.

Ghoul staggers back from the force of the strike - a clean right hook across his jaw.

"Shut the fuck up and start packing," says Poison, undeterred, as though there was no break in the conversation. "We're headed to D's. If we drive fast we can make it by - "

Ghoul abruptly lunges, catches Poison around the middle, and the two go down in a silent fit of fists and feet. You jolt on the spot at the suddenness of it. Automatically, you glance to Kobra and frown. He's staring fixedly into the middle distance rather than so much as acknowledge the scrap kicking up dust not five feet away. For a long moment, there's nothing save for the faint grunts of the two of them tangling against one another, Ghoul sinking a fist into Poison's mouth and Poison kneeing him in the ribs with a nearly inaudible snarl.

Kobra starts walking for the car. You hesitate, torn between those two opposing forces, before you jog to catch up to him and _stare_ at him sharply.

Kobra shrugs.

"It's...they do this," he says. "'S fine."

You frown.

Based on Kobra's reaction, you're willing to bank on the fact that it isn't, really, in the least bit fine.

"It ain't."

Kobra pins you with a furrowed brow and a thin mouth, like he's fully aware that you're parroting his words back at him and none too pleased about it.

"No?" he says, the word low with suspicion.

"No." You're tired and you want nothing more than to lie down and close your eyes for an hour - one whole hour just to sleep - but that's not about to happen in these circumstances, you don't think. 

"Why the fuck not?"

What you should say is any number of things: that you're all tired, that you might still have BL/ind at your tail, that you have a lot of ground to cover, that people shouldn't claw at each other's throats when they're meant to be, ostensibly, all in one crew.

What you say instead is possibly the stupidest thing you can imagine, but it's the only answer that springs to your tongue in time:

"Because I said so."

The Kid looks about ready to roll his eyes at that. It's a wonder he doesn't lay you out right then and there for it. 

But then he turns and heads back to the remaining two of your number. Poison has one hand fisted into the fabric of the Ghoul's shirtfront, the other drawn back in preparation to hit him for what has to be the third or fourth time, if the blood running down his nose and into his mouth is any indication. This doesn't seem to have affected Ghoul very much at all - his grin is bladed as ever, despite the pink staining it. Several crescent-shaped, reddened marks dug into Poison's upper arms suggest that they haven't gotten out of this brawl unscathed either. 

You happen to be intimately familiar with the exact shape made by teeth buried in flesh.

You and the Kid exchange a glance. Every part of you feels heavy with fatigue from the day's clap, combined with your meltdown in the car afterward, but what choice do you have?

Then, with a sigh, Kobra reaches over and grabs Poison by the back of their jacket to haul them off. You swallow down your exhaustion and busy yourself with doing the same for the Ghoul. You've done this once before, though you're hoping it doesn't start to turn into a habit. He tries to make a lunge for Poison as soon as Kobra starts to drag them back, their limbs flailing, but you've got your arms wrapped tight around Ghoul's chest and have him more or less held up off the ground. He doesn't weigh much but he's wiry, and he makes up for his diminutive height by being a squirmy little bastard. You're no scarecrow; the weight nearly topples you the more Ghoul struggles, but you keep your grip tight until Kobra releases Poison and they storm off, swearing under their breath. Only then do you let the Ghoul go. His feet hit the dust and he whirls on you with his smile like the serrated edge of a knife.

"Try that again, starfucker." You can feel the anger rolling off him like heat from a smoking raygun, but he just _laughs_ at you, brazen and barefaced. "Just fuckin' try it."

You hold his gaze and actively suppress the urge to punch him in the balls. 

Ghoul steps forward until he's inches from you, even if he has to crane his neck and stand ramrod straight to lock eyes. There's already fresh, dark bruising patterning one cheek, swelling his eye partially shut. 

There's a muffled _crash_ as, behind him, Poison kicks over something or another. A chunk of dust-eaten wood flies out from the building Ghoul parked out beside. Presumably they're destroying what remains of the interior to boil off the rest of their adrenaline.

Ghoul bounces slightly on his feet. For a moment, you think that maybe he'll try and fling himself at you next. But he only sneers and shoulders roughly past you to kick at the ground underfoot, scuffling up clouds of dirt.

Right now, nothing feels better than the thought of sitting yourself down and breathing out.

Kobra hovers at the doorway of the dilapidated building. Ghoul is sat facing away from all of you, his shoulders heaving as he works out whatever he needs to get out of his system. Adrenaline. Aggression. Maybe if you leave him alone for long enough, it'll burn off like fog in the midmorning sun, though you're not exactly optimistic of this.

If it were up to you, it'd be preferable to leave Poison and Ghoul to stew for a couple of hours. You don't have that luxury. A mass of motor dust in the distance is a solemn indications that you're not out of the proverbial sandstorm just yet; Bat City still has it out for you. That means loading back into the car and trying to lose your tails before heading to Dr. D's.

Poison cranks on the radio, but for once, they don't say a thing the whole drive. You sit shotgun while Ghoul simmers in the backseat. Kobra, when you glimpse him in the sideview mirror, looks very much like he'd prefer to be anywhere but where he is. His shoulders have hunched up, and he's more or less shrunken down in place, like he wishes he could sink deeper into his seat.

Given the tensions that broil silently in the Trans Am for the hours it takes to make it to Dr. Death's station, you can't say you can blame him for that.

****

**\--**

**mr. sandman's been showing his beam  
when he walks into a room the walls lean in to listen**

**\--**

You're right; Dr. Death doesn't remember you. Or if he does, he doesn't breathe a word about it.

But you've changed, and so has he. At some point in the intervening years, he lost the use of his legs, and now makes use of what appears to be a heavily modified wheelchair to move around. His face is a little more lined, his hands and arms a little more scarred, but he looks close enough to the man you remember to be recognizable: long, dark hair bound back with a bandana, dark beard and mustache. His station is a small, cramped space. The parts of it not crammed with radio equipment and soundboards and nests of wires are plastered with colorful scraps of paper - old magazines, newspaper clippings, cut-out patches and symbols and scraps of cloth. A few lazy bands of light stream through the boarded-up windows and illuminate a thicket of blinking lights. You're reminded automatically of Hot Chimp's mobile radio station, operating outside the back of a van. This one feels like it has double the amount of equipment combined with half the amount of space.

"You tumbleweeds pick up another stray?" Dr. Death's drawl is familiar enough to leave an ache of memory in your chest. By now it's reflex that has you pretending that you don't pick up on the words, or the wry jab behind them.

"Shove it," says Poison as they shake the hair from their eyes. They don't respond to the barb or even acknowledge it; they simply calmly and casually redefine the boundaries of the conversation by out and out ignoring it. They're one of the few people that can manage a thing like that. It has something to do with the air of authority they exude nigh constantly. They draw everyone's eyes when they enter a room. They speak, and people listen. They could be saying the most vulgar, callous shit in the world, and that wouldn't be capable of toppling the magnetic pull of their eyes, their hair, their tipped-up chin, the unsubtle _fuck you_ that lies strung up in every wiry limb. 

"Where's Pony?" says Kobra. You're not sure who he means by that.

"Out," says Dr. Death shortly.

"Shiny." Poison draws the word out with enough lazy indolence to make it clear that they don't actually care. "All right, D. You called, and we came. What's so important that you needed to see _me?"_

"I didn't ask for _just_ you." 

"Me and my crew, then."

The doctor slides his dark glasses down his nose and looks over the tops at Poison. They drum their fingers on the edge of some piece of equipment you can't name.

"We're fresh off a raid with no juice," snaps Poison. "Not unless you want a crate of dog food."

"I assume that's why Fun Ghoul has a black eye," Dr. Death says mildly.

Poison lifts their chin and eyes him off coolly and doesn't answer.

"We're dry," they say shortly. "So if you just wanted some free shit, we can't help you there."

"Hm," says Dr. Death. He stretches the syllable skeptically, but doesn't press the point. "Well, you're in luck. I didn't ask you over here for the pleasure of your _winning_ company. What I got is a motivation. You're the right sort of people to try pullin' it off."

Ghoul mutters something under his breath. He's keeping to the back of the station, his shoulders hunched and his head angled away from the discussion. Kobra's back tenses, but he doesn't respond otherwise.

"You interested or not?" says Dr. Death, pulling your attention back to the forefront.

Poison glances back at the three of you. Ghoul flips them off. You incline your head faintly in a nod. Kobra shrugs.

They roll their eyes when they look back to the Doctor.

"Shoot."

Dr. Death rolls over to his soundboard and starts picking through some of the detritus scattered beside it until he emerges with a scrap of lined, yellowed paper that he promptly passes to them.

"Got word of a place out in Zone Six, out near Ashpoint," he says. "Old house, looks like. Right at the fringe of the Radiation Belt. Intel says that whoever lived there was an arms dealer. We're talkin' guns, we're talkin' bombs. No clue if they were sellin' to either side of the Wars, but _reportedly_ they kept a cache in the area. Could be worth checkin' out."

"How much shit are we talkin', here?" Poison's tone is deceptively casual, but you can tell by the way their eyes flick over the paper, taking in whatever chicken-scratch lives there, that they're interested.

"Hard to say," says Dr. D. "But I'm willin' to split the takings if you're willin' to risk it."

Nothing is, technically, stopping you all from redlining out and taking the whole mess for yourselves. But it's not Poison's style. They don't upend trust like that. And getting on the bad side of a DJ, out in the Zones, means you must have a hell of a death wish.

"Didn't figure you for a weapons dealer, D," says Poison.

"You know me," says Dr. Death, which isn't an answer at all. "We don't need to be fifty-fifty here. I just need enough to get by, and the rest is all yours."

So what's in it for him?

It's an uneven deal. Getting that kind of intelligence can't have been easy. What was the source of that, anyway? Who knows about stuff like _bombs_ other than the odd detonator like Ghoul? Is he talking prototype lasers, or something even older - guns that deal in bullets and cordite? There's not enough information, and a part of you can't help but wonder if that might be intentional.

"You wanna see if we can do it, don't you?" Poison doesn't even sound upset when they say it. The corner of their mouth ticks upward slightly, and the words are idle.

Dr. Death shrugs slightly.

"You're the only burners I can think of who'd pull it off."

The only ones stupid enough, skilled enough, out of their _minds_ enough to try it, you think he means, especially when you recall the raid it took to get here.

The raid that everyone survived just fine. For the first time in your life, maybe, no one was _hurt_ during the clap with BL/ind. It was brief, cutthroat, and efficient. The only injuries that you as a group sustained were the ones inflicted upon yourselves by each other. That, and your own inconvenient deficiencies and your inability to stop shaking.

"If it's crates full'a bullets, I'm drivin' right back here to kick your ass, D," says Poison, but there's an odd companionability to the words when they say them. There's that half-bitter, twisted smile of theirs again, hard-angled and askew.

Dr. Death snorts at that one, amused.

"If it's bullets, don't even bother. That shit went outta style in the early aughts. Sell it to Tommy; he'll find a way to pass it off to somebody."

Poison laughs, a spirited, scornful burst of noise that's as pointed as they are. They start to breeze out of the station, and you turn to follow.

"Hold it, sunshine." Something in Dr. D's tone has sharpened. You go rigid. You think by the tenor of the words that he's speaking to you specifically, and slowly, you turn to face him.

Has he recognized you?

You can't read his eyes behind his sunglasses, but he's rubbing at his beard with one hand.

"That an old U.S. flag on your back?"

People keep asking you that, but by now you're used to it.

"American," you say uncertainly.

Dr. Death makes a faint sound that's halfway between a laugh and a sigh. "Yeah, the U.S. That takes me back."

From the doorway, Poison catches your eye. They're frowning slightly, no longer so impatient to depart. You assume that, like you, they're interested in seeing where this goes.

The Doc wheels over to one of the many crates of ephemera stacked up along the walls. He flips through the contents of one for a moment before extricating something wide and flat and rectangular before sliding a disc from the packaging - a real, genuine record that he flips over and settles on a player with a practiced efficiency.

"The fuck's he doing?" mutters Ghoul in the back. Kobra elbows him quiet. The sound of a needle scratching over vinyl aborts the swell of a potential argument.

Pretty soon, the music begins to play. It's loud and brassy and orchestral, nothing at all like the typical noise that gets broadcast on stations like the Doc's. There aren't any guitars or guttural vocals wailed out on top of layers of sound. Instead, it's a triumphant cascade of instrumentals.

"Old anthem," says Dr. Death, almost wistfully. "Hell if I can remember the words, but that was back when we had an actual country out here."

"BL/ind don't talk about shit from then," says Poison.

"'Course they don't." Dr. D rubs his hand over his face. He looks, abruptly, incredibly tired. "They block out anything they don't want people knowin'. Ain't many of us left to remember how things used to be."

Silence.

You hadn't expected a jacket that you'd simply liked the look of to stir so much discussion the way it has, but you can't possibly be resentful when it's proven a window to what life was like before BL/ind. Music that didn't exist solely to spite a megacorporation, a _national anthem_ indicative of an entire country - these concepts are as foreign to you as the idea of a life without war.

Poison shifts on the spot. Whatever patience might have held their tongue before now is rapidly waning.

"We'll be 'round after the run," they say at last. "Your intel better've been good."

"Keep your boots tight," says Dr. Death, and you begin to file out. You're the last to exit. You glance over your shoulder, thinking that maybe you should thank Dr. Death. For what, you can't say. For saving your life not so long ago, even if he didn't know it. For playing back a memory for you to hear. For a lot of things.

But when you look back, he's not watching you. He's not even watching the door. 

He's just staring at the record as it spins and spins.

****

**\--**

**keep a calendar  
this way you'll know the last time you came through**

**\--**

All told, it's a bad run.

Dr. D's intel was incomplete, or at the very least exaggerated. The house, when the four of you finally find it, is little more than a blackened husk that looks like it's been set on fire multiple times in recent years. Almost everything inside is singed and coated with crusted-over layers of ash. It's not all worthless: Ghoul manages to uncover an old, massive weapon you don't know the name of, something that probably shoots mortar-like projectiles if its size and length is any indication. It's in rough shape, but he still makes a point of dragging it out to the car. The rest of it is old shit, too old to make any use of - boxes upon boxes of bullets that look like they've been here for decades, at this point. It's possible that someone else might've gotten here first, but at this rate it's impossible to say.

Nonetheless, you load up the car with whatever you can find, purely to justify the gas it took to drive out here. Ghoul ends up taking the car to meet up with another crew in the area, one that Poison claims they've got friendly relations with, presumably to see how many of your pickings he can trade for the gas necessary to get all the way back to Dr. D's, or at least out of Zone Six. You almost requested that you go with him - sending Ghoul to do some solo negotiation feels like a recipe to make some brand new enemies out of what should be friends - but the Kobra Kid had insisted on staying to try and strip a couple old appliances for useful parts. None of you want to come back to this part of Ashpoint once the deal's done, and Kobra said he needed the spare sets of hands to really get into what Poison called an old dishwasher and take it apart in earnest. You and Poison had ended up staying at his behest, which is around the time that the waveheads dropped by for a bracing little shootout.

"I'm gonna _kill_ him," fumes Poison, fetched up against the wall. One of the wavies had proved to be more than a little handy with a knife upon entry; one good throw later, and Poison's been pinioned to the fucking wall like a fly to cork-board. They reach up to rip the thing free. You take the inherent risk of grabbing hold of their wrist to stop them. They glare daggers at you for it, but they don't wrench the blade out, at least.

You're doing your best not to think of Fever Queen, of how quickly ze bled out once a blade was buried in zir abdomen.

You're doing your _best_.

"Seven of them," says Kobra, dropping down behind the wall to report his quick headcount. "Three of us."

You can't say you like those odds.

What little glass has remained in the windows has been blown to hell and back. Irregular discharges of raygun fire fry the wood and mortar of the house and showers the three of you with splinters of the stuff in a cascade of multicolored electrical bursts.

"We stick around here any longer, we're gonna have 'em flankin' us," snaps Poison. Again they make a grab for the weapon that's skewered them through the arm, and again you prevent it. This time, they save their glowering for the dead husk of wavehead smoking on the floor not three feet away. It might've gotten a knife through Poison's arm, but it got a neckful of laser fire for its trouble.

Kobra's watching Poison. By now you know that he's waiting for the plan, because they're the usually one who has one, and they're the one whose plans are always undertaken. They've lasted longer in the Zones than you feel they should have, considering that their tactics seem to largely consist of pilfering from BL/ind and ripping shit from supply trucks. You don't manage a thing like that without having a solid fucking grasp on strategy.

The problem is that Poison's plans usual entail Poison as a central keystone, and for obvious reasons they can't go tearing around the corner and drawing anybody's fire just now. Even you, whose knowledge of medical shit is piecemeal at best, know that removing a knife that deeply buried in someone's _arm_ for fuck's sake is only going to risk bleeding them out extremely rapidly.

"Fuck. Fuck!" Poison slams a fist into the wall. You wince reflexively, trying not to think of how that must feel when the impact inevitably jostles the blade wedged between muscle and bone. They hardly seem to notice. "All the bombs and shit're in the car. _Fuck!"_

Seven on three. Those aren't great numbers, and you don't have the benefit of distance or the advantage of surprise. The chances of getting out this without further injury are, in a word, _low._ They're very fucking low.

You breathe. You tighten your grip on your gun. You flex your fingers around the handle, force the steady drop of your shoulders. This won't kill you, you don't think. It will almost kill you, the way everything _almost_ kills you. Whether it's because the Destroya has an eye out for you or because you pissed off the Witch in a past life, you can't really say, but the calm that steals up and pools in the cavity of your chest is cold and pathological and you _breathe_ because you know you can work with this.

You watch the pattern of the shots as they shower sparks from above. The angles are consistent, not ever-changing. One by one, you gauge the positions of your shooters. At least four of them. It's possible the other three don't have guns, or are out of range. That doesn't mean they're not armed, but your priority is going to be in not getting fucking sniped so you're going to have to take out the long range shooters _first._

"Cover the door," you tell Poison.

"What - _why?"_ Already their eyes are filling with incense, though whether it has to do with you giving them something almost like an order or some other reason, you can't really say. You hand them their gun, and they take it with their free hand in a grab that seems automatic. Their aim with their left hand isn't as steady as yours, but between the natural shakes that wrack their arms and those generated by the pain and the blood loss, you'll take what you can get.

"Because I said so." You ignore the flash of outrage over Poison's features and turn instead to Kobra, who's crouched down beside his sibling and watching. His face is blank and watchful.

To Kobra: "Cover the windows."

He nods.

Then you're scrambling up onto the countertops, vaulting over and through the windows, and shooting. Poison makes a strangled noise of surprise - "wait, shit, _Jet!"_ \- but you're already moving and you hit the ground running. You sprint forward and you can tell that the waveheads weren't expecting that because the pattern of their fire falters for a second. You take in the battlefield in short, sharp bursts as you tear forward, and you do the math. You calculate the angles. You track the trajectories. You remember laser-bolt velocity. You'll need to time this exactly right if you're going to get Poison and Kobra out of this. 

Three wavies taking cover behind a truck, probably their own. A fourth at the wall of the house, probably searching for an entrance to ambush who's inside. Two more to the other side, likely doing the same. The last standing without any cover whatsoever, shooting two-handed. Their gun immediately levels on you but you blast them down with one clean shot to the head, punch a smoking hole into their fucking eye. 

One down.

By now, the rest of them are firing on you. A laser sizzles at your shoulder, blowing away the old patch you sewed over the charred fringe of the leather and re-tearing the damage to the fabric. Another ignites the skin of your collarbone. That would be their sharpshooter. You really don't feel like waiting for their aim to improve so they can headshot you, so when they pop out of cover to hit you again, you do them the courtesy of blowing out their throat with a single shot. It strikes up a symphony of red fire in your skull. If they thought pain would slow you down then they have a poor understanding of what your life up until this point has been like. Another wavie shouts, tries to get their sights on you from behind the car when you dust their buddy, but they're not fast enough and you crater their temple into a fountain of blood and lasersmoke.

That's three.

Your leg fizzles with the numb burn of a laser. You go down but you catch yourself before you sprawl helpless. You're up on one knee and still firing. Three pulsing points of pain fan out from the epicenter of three burn holes. Your breath almost catches in your throat. Doesn't. You need two shots to take out the legs of the offending shooter at the side of the house and a third to punch them through the chest.

That's four down and that leaves two behind you and one at your front. You'd like to take care of the one that has the best cover first so they can't shoot you down from the back but that leaves Kobra and Poison potentially wide open so instead you spin and leave another wavehead's guts steaming. They slump against the side of the house and slide down, leaving a reddened smear on the old wood.

You've got two left, and that's when the one that's been crouched behind the car decides to go out swinging, because now there's a pair of wiry arms around your neck and they're dragging you down without any coordination whatsoever. You're starting to feel the laser-burns to your shoulder, your collar, and your leg in earnest; your reaction times have slowed. You feel yourself land heavily on top of them, feel something give and _crack_ beneath, but the wavie's grip only tightens. They're pinching your airway shut. Your finger spasms on the trigger of your raygun automatically and you sear the sky with a spray of red-tinted light.

You've been hit three times and you're being strangled, slowly, even as you abandon the effort of shooting your attacker and have now settled for pawing at their face instead. You don't have the leverage to hit them and you feel their teeth snap over your thumb hard enough to draw blood, but you _do not shout_ because you have to concentrate on what's important, and what's important is ghosting this fuck before they ghost you. Your index finger traces the edge of their eye socket and you stab into it with zero hesitation. You dig at the spot viciously until you feel your nails sink into something soft and jellylike and the wavie releases you with a scream.

Then there are two sharp blasts of plasma overhead, and the wavehead lies sizzling on the ground.

You double over coughing, kicking the sun-scarred body away from you even as the act shoots a shivering jolt up the length of your injured leg, and glance up. Kobra's already rounding on the last wavehead. They try to shoot him point-blank, but he catches their wrist and knees them hard between the legs and then does _something_ with their arm, some deft twist that disarms them and leaves their gun skidding into the sand, and by then it's over. He closes fingers of one hand around their neck and fists the other at the stringy hair that still clings to their heat-blistered scalp and twists in an act that reminds you, viscerally, of the first time you ever saw a drac die. He snaps their neck like it's nothing and lets them drop limp to the ground.

So that leaves you with seven dead waveheads, three ray-burns, and no one left to fight. Kobra's at your side in half a minute, and he doesn't say anything at first - just holds out a hand that you take without hesitation. 

Poison looks like they're actively vibrating with tension when you limb back inside, Kobra supporting you. Their hand's wrapped around the blade sunk into their arm like they're about to rip it out, though they stop when the pair of you enter.

"What the fuck," says Poison, the words flat. You don't think it's a question, so you don't answer.

"They're down," says Kobra, helpfully.

"Oh, _really?"_ Poison all but snarls. "You gonna get this shit off'a me, or - " They trail off abruptly. Their eyes take in the both of you with short, sharp efficiency. Almost immediately, their hostility all but dissipates. "Fuck. How bad is it?"

_"No hay bronca,"_ says Kobra, utterly deadpan.

Fuck him, anyway.

You've had worse and you feel it should be a given that you've had worse. You settle for easing yourself away from Kobra and dropping into a crouch at Poison's side, digging in your pockets for whatever you've got on hand. You're not Titan; you don't have a million little compartments sewn into your clothing to carry all the shit that might come in handy during a clap, but you've still got the basics. Sewing kit. Clean napkins. 

So: first things first. Poison eyes you warily.

"The fuck are y - " 

You yank the knife from their arm with no warning whatsoever.

_"Fuck! Jesus!"_

Kobra starts as though you've just shot them. Nonplussed, you drop the thing to the ground with a clatter. The place doesn't have any clean water, but it does have a bottle of something sharp-smelling and alcoholic that Kobra found stashed in a compartment underneath the sink, not long after Ghoul drove off, still mercifully intact after the clap. It's not antiseptic. It'll have to do.

"Fuuuuuck! Fuck fuck fuck!" Poison tries to rip their arm from your grasp, head thrown back. Reflexive tears have sprung into the corners of their eyes. They snap their hand up to claw at your face, probably to shove you back, but Kobra has cottoned on to what's happening and seems to be fine with it given your obvious end goal, because he drops down to wrestle their arm down. The intervention is much appreciated, considering that your laser burns are none too pleased with their rough treatment right about now. The one on your collarbone pulses unpleasantly, but you got used to the stench of your own cooked flesh years ago. You haven't been bleeding out the longest. And even if you were - 

"Bottle," you tell the Kid, the vowels twisting slightly when you adjust the pronunciation mid-word. If Kobra notices, he doesn't say anything about it. He hooks a hand around the thing and unscrews it before passing it to you.

You don't give Poison a chance to register what you're about to do. Their expression is glazed and petrified; it's dubious that they're getting much of what's happening. Again without warning, you wrench their jacket sleeve back and start pouring.

For about two seconds, Poison's face goes blank.

Then their foot kicks out, thumps over the floor, their back arching against the wall as their muscles clench with an unendurable tension. Kobra presses down with his teeth clenched, one hand closed around Poison's wrist and the other arm braced over their chest to keep them from lurching to their feet. You can't read the look that pinches his face, but you think Poison might be hyperventilating.

"Hey. You're okay." Kobra briefly releases their arm to rub at the back of their neck, bracingly. Then, to you, without looking away: "How bad?"

You shake your head. They got lucky. The blade slammed directly between two bones that you know exclusively as _tōkotsu_ and _shakkotsu_; you don't know the words for them in English. The nerve damage might very well be inevitable, but at this point you're not sure if it's possible for the nervous tremors that you know Poison already endures to get even worse. 

"Between the two." You indicate the rough positions to the length of the bones of Poison's upper arm. "Could be worse."

"Ulna and radius," says Kobra.

You don't know if those words are the same as the ones you know, nor how Kobra knows the words for different parts of the human body, so you merely nod. 

"Hold them down?"

Kobra's lips press together grimly, but he nods.

"Fuck you," says Poison raggedly. "Fuck _both_ of you. No one holds me down. _No one."_

Kobra leans in close and says something so quiet you don't hear it. It's very obviously not for your ears so you disregard it, concentrate on starting to rinse your hands as best as you can with a palmful of alcohol, which is the closest you can get to soap and water. You do the same to the tip of the needle. It's not ideal. It'll have to do.

You know from experience that this will hurt. You've had to do it to yourself often enough.

When you turn back to the pair of them, Kobra isn't holding his sibling down anymore. You pause very visibly, prompting a glare.

"Fuckin' get _on_ it, Jet," Poison spits. 

Kobra holds out a hand. Without hesitation, Poison takes it, their fingers interlacing tightly with their brother's. Their grip is tight enough to blanch their knuckles. If this is in any way painful to the Kobra Kid, he does nothing to indicate it.

Poison clenches their jaw as you begin, pulling needle and thread through the apposed edges of their flesh and drawing them together. You work one-handed, while the other keeps what's left of the alcohol ready to rinse away any additional mess. You can feel heat and blood seeping into the fabric of your jeans from the shot to your leg, but it's a negligible pain at best. You grit your teeth against it, against the light-headedness that threatens to wobble your steady hand. _Not yet._

It's a testament to Poison's resolve that they don't cry out, not even when you rinse away the residual blood and grime with another douse of alcohol. By the time you've finally tied off both lines of stitching and wound a bandage around the bloodied mass to keep it under wraps, Kobra looks like his hand might have possibly gone numb. Poison releases him as soon as you step back. They rocket to their feet at once, sway slightly, and catch the countertop for balance.

"Fuck," says Poison. They shake their hair from their face. The muscles around their eyes are still pinched with the lingering pain and discomfort that you know won't go away for a few hours at least.

You back away. You're pretty sure they won't want you around them right now, not after that. You make to exit the building, to go through whatever the wavies might have had on hands and try and get _something_ out of this mess, when Kobra catches your shoulder and spins you around with enough force to buckle your injured leg beneath you.

He stabs a finger into your chest, making you wince when the laser burn there ripples with a flaring thrum of agony.

"You next," says Kobra, with no small amount of menace.

"I can do it." You've mended your own injuries before. You blink rapidly a few times, shake your head to clear it.

"Fuck that," says Poison. The words are more than slightly shaky. Both you and Kobra, by unspoken agreement, pretend not to have noticed. Poison grins nonetheless, wide and almost feral in spite of their injury. "This is payback, motherfucker. _Because I said so."_ They seem to take a special delight in singsonging those words back at you.

You try to back off and wave them away, but your knees buckle in the act, and then you're in the Trans Am.

More to the point, you wake inside the Trans Am, awkwardly sprawled on the backseat with Kobra looking cramped and more than a little uncomfortable with your boots up on his lap.

Kobra looks at you and shifts slightly. It could be surprise, but it's hard to tell. He's wearing his sunglasses again and what little you can see of his expression gives nothing away.

"Oh," he says, completely monotone. "He's awake."

"You passed out," says Poison, sat in the front. For some reason, Ghoul is driving, which strikes you as odd since you're pretty sure Poison rarely lets anyone else drive unless the situation demands it. That's when it comes back to you in a rush - the clap, the wavies, the injury to Poison's arm. The three hits you took clearing out the opposition.

"Dumbass," adds Kobra. Again, it's hard to say if he actually means it, so you just squint at him. "Sit up, will you?"

You comply because at this point, being awkwardly stuffed in the back of the Trans Am isn't pleasant for anyone, especially given that you and Kobra are easily the tallest between the four of you. Your hand brushes the napkin wound around the place on your clavicle where one of the wavies struck true. Your throat convulses in a swallow when you force yourself to look away, to look anywhere else, try not to think about how far back any of them might have peeled your shirt and what they might have _seen_ \- 

Instead you gesture at the bandage with one hand, loosely. "Who...?"

"Me," says Kobra. He shrugs.

You look at him for a long moment. In hindsight, that should have been obvious, just based on what he knew about human anatomy in the moment.

You finger the napkin wrapped around your collarbone and summarily discard every attempt to ask if Kobra _noticed_ anything, if he _felt_ anything strange, if he _learned_ anything about you in the time it took to clean and wrap the burn stretched out over your chest and your neck. If he noticed the duct tape scars laid into your skin, or the bandages tight over your chest. Given that his sibling is Party Poison, a luneshine with fair features and a deliberate androgyny, perhaps he _did_ notice and simply didn't care. That doesn't make it any easier to bear.

There's no graceful way to ask. This you've long since accepted.

So you just say, "thanks," and hope that he doesn't say anything about it, which he doesn't. He only shrugs again and goes back to looking out the window.

Ghoul gets to drive for the next five days or so while Poison's arm heals. You think that Kobra is more than a little relieved when Poison finally commandeers the wheel again, and you're inclined to agree.

****

**\--**

**oh  
"i know what you're going through"**

**\--**

Your sleep has always been fitful at best, and you know that Poison's the same. They're up often, despite how they take more night shifts than anyone else. They're the first to volunteer to keep watch while everyone else bunks down for the night, and they're the first awake when the morning comes.

They're not as mouthy as Ghoul but they're not as quiet as you are. Everything about them is bold to the extreme, from the color of their hair to the pointedness of their neutrality. In spite of the intensity of their snarl, the tight-wound, coiled-spring tension that infects their every move with a vicious resolve, they're fair-boned in a way that makes their facial features seem almost delicate. It's easy to forget it when they pin someone with their look - acute and incisive and assessing.

Luneshines aren't one thing or the other - they're all sorts and they all look different. You've known too many in your life (however long it is that you've lived) for that to stand out, and it's not what you noticed first anyway. It was the magnetic pull of Party Poison's disposition that caught your attention. You think the same can be said for most everyone else who meets them. It's like they catch people in their gravity well and draw them ever closer.

On the nights when both you and Poison are awake and neither of you mind the burden of company, the pair of you sit up on the hood of the Trans Am while they smoke a nic-stick or you pass sharp-tasting liquor between you or simply sit and watch the night skies. You don't have much to say about yourself, as a general rule. Neither do they. Instead they do things like heckle you for your choice in records while you smile crookedly back. 

They say Mad Gear saved their life, and you believe them.

In a way, Mad Gear saved your life too.

"First time I heard 'em," says Poison softly, looking out into the desert's clouded night sky, "everything felt _red."_

Fitting. You laugh, the sound faint in the back of your throat. "You're always red."

"Yeah," says Poison, drawing the word out as though it were obvious, and - they think you're talking about their hair.

Again, you laugh.

"Not your hair." You make a loose, circular gesture to indicate the whole of them. "Everything."

Poison stares at you.

"You, uh." The words trail off. Then they lift two fingers, brace them to the side of their temple. The gesture reminds you, for half a second, of someone placing a raygun to the side of their head, but that's not what this is so you blink and the mental image fades. "You see 'em too?"

You frown.

"The colors," says Poison. "You see 'em too? When people...with all the noise and stuff?"

You nod, still frowning, because it never occurred to you that this was something unique. Color has always been tied up in sound to you. You've always heard things and seen them, _felt_ their hue, in the same moment. And Party Poison has always been as red as their hair, vibrant and jagged and streaking in chaotic bolts like laser fire.

"Nobody's ever..." Poison drops their hand and you think they're making a conscious effort to smooth away the uncertainty that's flickered over their features. It doesn't suit them, being unsure. They're not indecisive. They can't afford to be. Every choice they make is made with the sum total of all their convictions; they never do things by half-measures. Not even now.

You watch them as they swallow, look at their hands, look out at the desert, look anywhere but at you.

"That's shiny, Jet," says Poison at last, and you can't place the emotion that hovers behind the words. Whatever it is, it nearly cracks them. The effort to speak steadily is in the way their gaze fixes on the horizon, in how they can't quite look at you. You remember how Kobra put it, and you think this might be what it is: an inability to relinquish control, even over themself. Still, they soldier on. If you weren't sitting so close, you might not have been able to pick up on the shadowed exhaustion that trembles beneath the locked-down veneer they paint over themself daily. "That's real shiny."

You're not sure what to say to that. You simply look at them, and they seem smaller like this, hunched against the hood of the car with their shoulders at a slouching angle, nothing like the proud, resolute silhouette they ordinarily boast. They're still not looking at you and words were never your strong suit, so you do the only thing you can think of to do and hold an arm out. Finally Poison glances back to you, their gaze dark with trepidation.

"I won't tell," you whisper.

They contemplate the unspoken offer for a moment longer before, with a soft sigh, they slide over to lean up against you. They're not as small as Ghoul, though they're not nearly as tall as you are (who is?), but when they're leaned up against you like this, you can feel the rapid thrum of their heart and the uneven quality of their breath and the subtle tremor that lives beneath their skin. Their head fits neatly up against your shoulder, their eye-achingly red hair tinted dark and brownish by the night sky. You can feel them shivering, and you don't think it's because of the cold, because like Ghoul, like Kobra, like so many others you've met and seen die, they're from the city. They're still wracked by the traces of the chemical haze that was forced on them by a power greater than anything, and you can't know what that's like. You know without question that you will never understand what that's like. Maybe they get that too.

You rub up and down at their arm loosely, the same way you remember Kobra did to you. Surprisingly, they let you do it.

You think that, maybe, Party Poison is consistent in their intensity and unrelenting in their resolve because they could never afford to be anything else. And just the same, you think that they could afford to allow themself to fall apart if they have to. 

You meant it when you said it to them - that you won't tell.

"We ain't your first crew," says Poison suddenly, propped up against you with your arm draped over the uneven slope of their shoulders, "are we?"

Your fingers on their arm tighten, and you have to make a willful effort to relax your grip.

Like so many other things, it's not something that's ever been asked of you before. It's not a question that people out here tend to ask. It's not something that you'd ever imagine _Poison_ would ask. Those kinds of searching questions, words that advance upon whatever might linger in your past - by unspoken rote, those are things that are best left unsaid.

Either Poison isn't wise to this rule (which you doubt), or they don't care (which you find significantly more likely). Either way, it takes you a minute before you can answer.

"No," you say, though the word feels as though it's lodged in your throat. 

You can feel the question that they don't speak aloud. The air tingles with it.

With your free hand, you hold up two fingers. Your arm feels leaden.

The night is silent save for the occasional hiss of wind over sand, and the barely audible cadence of Kobra and Ghoul's breathing.

"Yeah," says Poison, the word almost soundless. "'S what I thought."

****

**\--**

**well i don't -  
it's more of a "paper or plastic" grocery store choice to me**

**\--**

The old, massive weapon that Ghoul found during the weapons run is, according to Dr. Death Defying, called a _bazooka,_ which is a fairly indicative name for what it proves to be capable of. The Ghoul spends weeks tinkering with the thing off and on, occasionally enlisting the Kobra Kid to help him with all its moving parts, though it's another week before he can get it to actually shoot anything. None of you have had any luck in finding ammo, so Ghoul decides to make his own, with mixed results.

The good news is that the first time he succeeds in getting it to fire, he blows up an entire car in a single shot that pulps the draculoids inside it and effectively ends what had been a days-long car chase out over Route Guano.

The bad news is that he misjudges the blast radius. Badly. The explosion engulfs him in cloud of smoke and dust almost immediately.

Kobra yells Ghoul's name loud enough to be heard over the ringing in your ears - in _all_ of your ears, you realize, because both Poison and Kobra are shaking their heads hard when they stumble out from behind the cover of the Trans Am.

When you find Ghoul, he's lying flat on his back, blinking at the sky.

_"DID I GET IT?"_ He's speaking abnormally loudly. _"DID I GET IT?"_

"Yeah, you fuckin' got it, asshole," says Kobra. The words are testy, but his tone shakes slightly as he says it. He's staring at Ghoul like he can't believe that the detonator is still in one piece.

Ghoul's still looking at him expectantly.

_"DID I GET IT?"_

You wince. His proximity to the blast radius -

You should've seen this coming. You drop into his view, and he starts to prop himself up on his elbows to look at you. You hazard the slight chance that you're not the only one in the Zones left who still knows how to speak with your hands, and sign hesitantly:

_Think you blew out your ears._

Ghoul blinks at you.

_No shit,_ he signs back.

You can admit it to yourself: he's surprised you with that one.

"Oh, hell," mutters Poison beside you. You follow their gaze and grimace slightly when you see what they're pointing at: the bared length of Ghoul's leg, which from ankle to upper thigh looks like it's had the skin fully stripped away. What remains is charred and reddened and smoking slightly. Now that you're no longer in a state of shock, the smell of it hits you.

Looks like Ghoul didn't get as far out of the blast radius as he'd like.

_Your leg's hurt bad,_ you tell him.

_"WHAT, REALLY?"_ Ghoul answers audibly, which prompts Kobra to look at him like he's started a cycle. Ghoul frowns, and starts to get his legs under him. _"I DON'T FEEL - "_

Then he tries to put weight on his burned leg and immediately loses his balance with a muffled curse. Poison lurches forward and manages to catch him before he goes sprawling into the dust. Ghoul starts to fight Poison's grip almost at once. He jerks in their arms in short, panicked bursts, trying to shove them away.

Poison flinches. "Hey! Hey, _stop it_, jackass - fuck!"

_It's okay,_ you tell Ghoul as quickly as you can. _We're trying to help._

Ghoul doesn't listen. He's barely looking at you. Again, he tries to pull away up until he puts weight on his injured leg again. He sags back into Poison's arms with a yelp.

_We're helping you,_ you try again. _Your leg is burned. We're going to help._

Ghoul stares at you with blurry eyes before he starts to laugh. The sound is ragged and scratchy and drawn out and it rasps like stone dragged over stone. He goes limp as a ragdoll in Poison's grasp, and Poison immediately grunts when Ghoul's full dead weight slumps back against them. For all his diminutive height, dragging someone along when they're loose as a corpse is never easy. You know this well enough.

"The _fuck_ did Kobra go?" Poison sounds strained. "Where's - _fuck. KOBRA!"_

They're yelling right beside Ghoul's ears. Ghoul doesn't so much as flinch.

Together, you and Poison get Ghoul to the Trans Am. All the while, Ghoul doesn't stop laughing. You can't tell if he can even hear it. Maybe if he could, he'd stop. It's shrill and unhinged and you want to seize him by his shoulders and _shake_ him until he shuts up, but you're not in the habit of doing that to _injured people_ so you swallow the urge down and help Poison support him as you lay him against the hood of the Trans Am. 

Kobra has closed himself in the backseat and isn't looking at either of you, and you're not about to demand that he step in to help. You don't know Kobra well enough to claim to have any idea why this has evidently rattled him, but if he wants to shut down, he can go right on ahead. Poison shoots him an absolutely lethal glare to no avail, but doesn't seem surprised.

_Alcohol,_ you say to Poison.

They look at you oddly.

"What?"

Right. They probably weren't paying any attention to you and Ghoul trading hand signals at each other, because they apparently have no idea that you were even talking to him in the first place.

"Alcohol," you say, verbally this time.

Their expression twists subtly as they look away, but they move to pop the trunk of the car open and start digging through it.

Ghoul is sprawled bonelessly on the hood of the Trans Am, no longer resisting now that no one has their hands all over him, and looks to be staring absently at the sky. You wave to get his attention, but he doesn't so much as blink. He's still laughing, though now it's diminished to fluttering, infrequent giggles as opposed to the out-and-out, borderline deranged hysterics, which somehow doesn't make it any easier to tolerate. 

He's not going to respond anytime soon, so you crouch down to get straight to it. You don't have to saw through the fabric of his pants - most of it's burned away. But the seared flesh is blackened and still smoking and it shouldn't be exposed to the open air like this. You're already searching your pockets for spare cloth to tear up into rags.

Poison returns with a jug of rubbing alcohol. It sloshes when you peer into it - only about half-full. They used it last, you remember, to clean some of the car's exterior paint-job. You're fortunate they didn't need the entire thing.

_This is going to hurt,_ you tell Ghoul. Based on the glassy quality of his stare, you're pretty sure he doesn't even notice.

"He's going to fight," you warn Poison.

"'Course he is." Poison shrugs. "You wanna pour, or are you scared of a little tetanus? He bites like a bitch." 

You already know how they know that.

"I'll pour."

"Sure," says Poison. Without further hesitation or warning, they lean over to press Ghoul down against the hood of the car. 

The effect is instantaneous. He snaps back to life, thrashes as though caught by scarecrows, bares his teeth and tries to sink them into the skin of Poison's arm several times over. Between his erratic jerking and how the pain doesn't seem to have had any effect on how furiously he kicks out at the pair of them, it's safe to say that he has plenty of adrenaline left in his system. That's not going to help. You take a boot to the face twice over before you can secure Ghoul's injured leg and start pouring the contents of the jug over the burned gash taken out of his leg. Ghoul's struggles immediately become that much more vocal. Half the words don't sound like English, but it's anyone's guess what they're meant to mean. Based on what little you _do_ understand, it's probably nothing more than a litany of formless profanity.

Clean it. Wrap it. Bind it. It'd be a damn sight easier if Ghoul weren't fighting you every inch of the way, and if Poison weren't yelling at you to _hurry the fuck up_ because Ghoul has managed to bite them twice and they're now swearing up a storm to match his own, but you do the best you can, given the circumstances.

Your best, as ever, isn't nearly good enough.

The next time you run into trouble, Ghoul makes a running leap at one of the dracs collectively menacing you. You've seen him do this before - making a sudden lunge at them and clinging ape-like to their backs. The tactic takes them off guard, just like basically everything about the Ghoul on principle, but this is the first time that he stumbles and falls and nearly gets a laser bolt planted between his eyes as a result. Kobra kicks the thing's knees in and then blows a crater into the back of its head before it can get any further than an angry, wordless rasp, but when the Kid offers a hand to help him up, Ghoul only manages to take a few steps forward before landing flat on his face.

"Fuck," he says, muffled, into the sand.

You get unsteadily to your feet. One of the pigs managed to get a little too close and floored you with a blow to the back of the head and your ears are still ringing.

Poison kicks a dead drac as it lies limp in the dust before noticing that one of their crew is still on the ground. "Ghoul?"

"Ngh," says Ghoul.

"Where'd they get you?" Poison's already moving to his side. You stagger after with another shake of your head to clear it. Kobra tries to grab Ghoul by the arm to haul him to his feet but he wrenches out of his grip at once.

"Fuck off."

Poison scowls. "Ghoul, get the fuck up. They shoot you, or what?"

Ghoul makes another muted noise. That can't be very comfortable, grunting into the sand, but he makes no move to get up.

"Ghoul." Again, Kobra reaches down to grab his arm. Again, Ghoul immediately jerks in his grasp.

"I said _fuck off!"_ His efforts to rip free have him flipping onto his back, and that's when you notice which of his legs is giving him trouble.

_Your leg._ He notices you speaking with your hands at once, and his shoulders hunch.

"What about it?"

Kobra and Poison stare at him like he's started spouting random answers unprompted. From their point of view, he might as well be.

_Can I see it?_

He hesitates.

But then, because you asked, you think, he nods and holds out a hand and allows you to pull one of his arms over your shoulders and help him over to the car. He sits on the hood and grimaces as he rolls the poorly patched leg of his pants up and -

"Fuck," breathes Poison. Kobra's nose wrinkles slightly.

It looks as though you didn't do a thorough enough job of bandaging that burn of his. More to the point, it _smells_ like it. When Ghoul peels away the pus-sticky rag you used to wrap the injury, one look at the wound confirms it. You remember seeing enough like it back at Gertie's, though you never had to handle them yourself. The signs should have been obvious - the sweat sticking his hair to his forehead, the faintly feverish heat rolling off his skin - but this is the Zones. _Everyone_ looks like that almost all the time.

"Well," says Ghoul lightly, "this stinks."

He begins to laugh.

_I need,_ you start before you catch yourself. Then, aloud: "I need a knife."

Wordlessly and without hesitation, Poison yanks a knife from their boot, flips it over, and hands it to you handle-first. It's wide and flat and glints in the sunlight and it reminds you intensely of watching Fever Queen get run through but you can't afford to think about that right now so you take it and test its edge on your fingertip. It's sharp. Good.

"Fire," you mutter. You need fire, preferably a _gas_ fire, though you're not sure how you're going to find something like that all the way out here.

"Fire?" says Poison.

You hold up the knife. 

"Oh, _god,"_ mutters Poison. But then Ghoul winces, digs a lighter out of his pocket, and holds it out. It's not a gas fire, but it's what you have on hand, so you flick the thing on and begin heating the blade.

"You wanna belt?" says Kobra, close to Ghoul's ear, so quiet that you don't think you were meant to hear it. But Ghoul's hearing has been in and out ever since he shot his prized weapon for the first time, so you've all had to speak up more and more around him if you want him to catch anything. You focus on heating up Poison's knife instead of paying attention to the exchange. You still don't miss Ghoul's tiny nod. Kobra undoes the thing and Ghoul gently takes it between his teeth. Even lets Kobra brace one hand against his shoulder.

"'Ogng' bwaeng 'ee ihy'gih ah l'ggh aie," says Ghoul, muffled.

You frown at him. _What?_

He rolls his eyes. _Don't blame me if you get a black eye._

He's still grinning as he says it, white around the brown of heat-cracked leather. This does very little to reassure you.

You don't get a black eye, when you run the flame-heated metal through the meat of the Ghoul's necrotizing calf and carve away the infected flesh. You don't weather innumerable bruises when you clean and bandage the fresh wound, as thoroughly as you can. You're wet with sweat and stained with someone else's redness and you do get a boot to the arm more than once, but you can't exactly fault Ghoul for that.

You don't get a black eye, but you don't think you'll ever get the radioactive tint of his scream out of your head.

****

**\--**

**but i'll sympathize with anything to get through to you  
do you know what it's like to watch reruns of yourself night after night**

**\--**

"Hey, Jet," says Poison. "You're good with a needle, yeah?"

It's a hypothetical question, you know, because Poison has seen and _felt_ full well how good you are with a needle. You shrug.

"C'mere."

Poison has their jacket spread out on the hood of the car. Inside Chow Mein's, Ghoul and Kobra are haggling for a good price for the contents of a bust-open BL/ind vending machine. Ghoul might be good at taking things apart - usually explosively - but Kobra's a deft hand at putting things together. For the past handful of months you've watched him fiddling on and off with a particular project here and there, something blocked in white with wires nestled in a chaotic frizz both in and around it. The next time you stopped at a place with one of those tall white vending machines, Kobra hooked it up to the thing and watched as it dropped pretty much everything he needed, free of carbons. Poison had laughed. Ghoul had celebrated by setting the shell of the thing on fire.

You ended up keeping most of the water and battery packs that the vendor contained, but its dozens of white rayguns make for easy _chavos._ If you're lucky, Chow Mein will take them for a good amount. You'd offer to go inside with the other two to ensure the deal goes down, but Kobra has a knack for numbers in a way that no one else you know has, even if he won't say how or why, and you have faith that he'll make sure that he and Ghoul aren't too badly burned.

So you're waiting outside instead, keeping watch on the Zones like you always do. Waiting for things to go sideways, for some catastrophe to blaze into your life.

Poison, if they notice your vigilance, says nothing about it. It's possible they don't, though. They have a singular focus on the back of their jacket and the locked-down, intent look they get when there's an idea caught in their head that won't be swayed for anything. Usually those ideas are along the lines of starting shit with other gangs or driving perilously close to the city in search of dracs to turn to pump off, but this time it's much smaller scale.

They press a scrap of paper to the jacket, and there's a symbol there. A circle with the caricature of a pill in the middle and large "x" slashed just beneath.

"I need this on the back," says Poison. "Red. Like me. Sound like somethin' you could do?"

As if you're about to say no to the self-proclaimed, self-appointed leader of the crew. You help them lay the symbol into the back of their jacket until it's as seamless and shiny as the rest, and Poison's grin is pearlescent for the rest of the day. When the rest of you muster up to depart Chow Mein's by evening, Poison stops you to shove something into your hands.

It's a patch, yellow and rectangular. It boasts a skull and a scythe and a large, black "A" mounted in two of the corners, each positioned over a symbol you don't recognize. You're not sure when they got it, but you're guessing they must have bought it off Chow Mein at some point when you weren't watching.

"Death can't fuckin' stop you," says Poison, clapping the side of your shoulder - the part of your jacket that's been laid open with a burned fringe ever since you took that hit for Kobra. You've never been able to get it fixed up for very long before it gets blown open again. "You're on the Witch's good side, I bet."

You're not sure how true that is, but you can recognize a gesture of good will when you see one. Because out of all of them, Poison's the only one who knows how many crews you've been through. They know that you've got two dead gangs of dust rats hiding away in the shelf of your shadow, and they know that when it came down to you against seven waveheads, you somehow managed to crawl out the other side with little more than three smoking burn-craters even though you walked unflinching into their crosshairs. You know that Poison doesn't issue thanks or apologies or anything so simple and verbal to express something like appreciation. When they indicate those things to you or anyone else, they do it with action, not words.

It's gratitude on their part. Pure and simple.

Your smile is small and fleeting, but no less sincere.

"Thanks."

Kobra and Ghoul return with a fresh mess of paints. You set about touching up the colors your gun. Ghoul picks up a couple spare masks that he finds in the box with the paints, and you start painting one of those too. You've never technically needed a mask; you're not from the city, not on any files that BL/ind might have, and your helmet has always been good enough. But Kobra has one and Poison has one, and their colors are synchronous to one another. Almost everything you have on you is black - jacket, boots, gloves, helmet. There's the yellow bolt on the visor, but Kobra and Poison already wear yellow. The same can be said for the red stripes on the flag down your back. And white is the color of the BL/ind.

The only choice left to you is blue, the same shade laid into your gun. It fits. When you think of the word "Jet," it's always felt _blue_ to you, the same way the word "Star" feels yellow as the rising sun. You don't need a mask, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't have one. Then, with a thin brush, you lean close and script the words carefully on either side of your gun's barrel in delicate lettering: _BECAUSE I SAID SO._

Ghoul notices them and makes a low, huffing sound almost like a laugh.

Poison evidently decides that it's officially time to repaint the car, and starts splashing up the hood and the sides with fresh coats of color. They lay a caricature of the American flag across one side, in front of the doors ("Flag gang!" says Ghoul triumphantly, before dousing one of Kobra's legs with a spilled can of acrylics in his enthusiasm and prompting a small but sudden fistfight) and, most perplexingly, the dark scrawl of a spider across the hood. Its legs are jagged streaks of black paint that splay across most of the hood, and its abdomen has a bright slash of a lightning bolt across the back.

"Huh," says Ghoul, the next time he and Kobra aren't at each other's throats. "The flag I get, but what've you got goin' for spiders?"

"'Cause we're eight legs strong," says Poison, shaking another can of spraypaint. They don't even look up from their work. "Eight legs to catch the flies for the BL/ind."

That is when you know, truly know, that you have no choice but to count yourself as one of them. You suppose that you already have been for a long while, no matter how often you've avoided thinking as much. You've sewed up their wounds and they've treated your burns. They've shared their soda and you've told them things you've told no one else and they've taken shots to protect you. You've given up on tracking what you've done for them and the other way around for what feels like months now. Maybe years.

But you haven't forgotten the promise you made to yourself either.

You won't be watching another crew of yours die.

(It's an oath you routinely make to yourself. The hypotheticals haunt you all the same.)

****

**\--**

**to offer nothing and expect everything in return  
to cock your head just right to appear arrogantly humble**

**\--**

Some of the gas stations out here are unmanned. You can usually tell once you pull up whether one's occupied or not. The people who run them tend to bill themselves as unaligned with anyone in particular, but once BLi comes roaring past, they do a good job of making themselves scarce. Fun Ghoul calls them cowards trying to make a cheap buck off the apocalypse. You're not sure whether or not you agree, but it's for the best if you don't say anything. Gas stations mostly remind you of scarecrows, of the dead weight of a body hitting sand, of getting shot at and running anyway.

This place actually appears to be deserted, which tends to mean that there isn't much to be picked from what's left of it. Ghoul, however, says that there's a little bit of fuel left in the tanks under the dirt. Poison gives him the go-ahead to set about digging for whatever he can find while the rest of you fan out and comb through the defunct building for anything else of use.

Kobra finds some old magazines. Poison finds a discarded bodysuit boasting a logo from the same fuel company whose words they wear proudly on their chest, the Dead Pegasus. You don't find anything of consequence. You take up your usual spot leaned against the car, keeping a sharp lookout for anything that might approach, and thinking of what you're going to do after each member of your crew dies. 

"Dr. D says this place used to be called Death Valley," says Kobra. He rips a page from the magazine he's perusing. "Before the Helium Wars, anyway. They called it Death Valley."

You wonder what you're going to do when a laser blast drops the Kobra Kid quietly into the sand, or when he gags on a mouthful of toxic gas. You can imagine the weight of his body underneath your hands already, when you flip it over and take in the emptiness in his eyes. Poison - you don't want to imagine the sound they'll make once they realize it. They'll react with anger, you think. They might even hit you, if you reach him first. You'll try and carry him, because you're the tallest, but Poison will insist on doing it instead.

"Thought BLi didn't believe in prophecy," says Ghoul, with a snort. 

You can picture Fun Ghoul the easiest. He's got the heat and fire in his soul that risk burning him inside out before a drac gets close enough to dust him. Scorched into a smear of grease and char by his own bomb, or incinerated by a BL/ind mortar ordnance when they get fed up with cleaning up killjoys by hand. He'll go out laughing, of course, and there won't be enough of him to pour, smoking and leaking slag, into a bodybag. He'll happily walk into a blast radius. You probably won't be able to recover anything of his to bring to the Witch, either, which is how he admitted it would probably happen, despite how you said that that you would. It's another one of those promises you know you won't be able to keep. You've felt how much he weighs, between his diminutive height and how underfed he is, like near about every other zonerunner. You know that people become so much heavier in death, but with Ghoul, that won't even be an option.

"You get grease in your ears?" says Kobra. "I said _before_ the wars."

Ghoul sounds unimpressed. "Then whoever named it was a real fucking fatidic motherfucker."

"Shut the fuck up." You can hear Kobra's scowl. "You don't know what that word means."

"Prophetic," you say, unthinking, frowning at the horizon with the images of ink running over old pages fresh in your mind. 

Ghoul immediately starts to laugh at that one. How he managed to hear you is anyone's guess - his left ear's been all but blown out since he stood a little too close to his own blast radius, and his hearing on that side is probably never coming back.

"Pretty weird to put gas stations in the middle of a place called Death Valley," says Poison, noncommittal.

And what are you going to do when Party Poison gets too close to the heat, when they get pumped full of plasma, when rolling tires crush their body into the fucking dirt? What are you going to do when a scarecrow strangles them, when you have to peel their body from the carbon-plastic composite of a BL/ind bodybag? You don't want to picture the vibrant, brazen, brilliant Party Poison, with their radioactive red hair and their imperious looks and their devil-may-care saunter, lying ghosted and broken and lifeless on the floor, but you're going to outlive them like you do everyone else so you have to accept what will come of that. What always, inevitably, comes of that.

"Not here _specifically."_ Kobra's tone is laden with frustrated resignation. "Never fucking mind. You all can forget I said anything if you can't appreciate _history."_

"What history? Not a care in the world for the BL/ind, right?" Ghoul has apparently found some fuel worth salvaging. He starts filling up the Trans Am's tank. _"History's_ all squeaky-clean now. Painted up nice and white."

"Painted black," says Poison. They say it so quietly that you're not sure you're meant to have heard it. Either way, the meaning behind it is...unclear. When they sidle up to you, it's to hold up the patch they've liberated from its old bodysuit and rest a hand on the car. "Think you can help me get this thing on the dash?"

You tip your head in a nod. You've already begun helping the rest of them in slapping stickers and letters to the car's interior and exterior. There's a Cosmic Thrust sticker and an Electrokat logo stuck to the side, held onto the metal by a combination of heat and wear and melted plastic. One of the other three (you don't know which) has managed to procure a sticker that says "ZONERUNNER" in shuddery, bicolored letters and fix it over some of the red and white stripes running down the Trans Am's side. The sprawling symbol of the spider that Poison initially threw across the hood has made its way over and around the rest of you: inside the car, on the back of your jacket, half a dozen other places besides. Someone (probably Ghoul) has scribbled hundreds of iterations of the words "NA NA NA" across each of the white stripes laid out along the side of the Trans Am for reasons unclear to you.

If anyone here outlives you, if they can't get your soul to the Witch, you think you'd like to die buried in this car. Compared to the dracs and the hordes of the nameless dead, it wouldn't be half-bad a final resting place.

Right now, it just means you're happy to add yet another abstruse symbol to the group's burgeoning collection. It'd be worth it just for that, but Poison's unabashed grin and their hand on your shoulder bleeds a warmth into your chest, and how are you going to carry that to a mailbox when the time comes for it? How are you going to bid farewell to someone so vibrant, so blistering, so full to bursting with vitality? Imagining Party Poison in relation to something as permanent as death feels _wrong._

It's not wrong, though. They're a killjoy. They're a Zone-rat, a dust-runner, a leader, a figure of interest in the desert and therefore a target to BLi. There's no question that they'll die young and they'll die bleeding. They'll die soaked in it, red as their hair, and you'll have to live with it.

They'll burn out. There's no fucking question about that.

Ghoul's saying something and tugging at the hose still hooked into the Trans Am, and Poison tells him to _do it,_ whatever "it" is - you're not clear on what that is, but Ghoul's undeniably pleased about it when he unhooks the pump from the car. Kobra is less so, though you're not sure what has him so up in arms. He paces and moves in tight circles and cracks his knuckles through his fingerless gloves. He ducks into the station, which you've all cased already and confirmed to be both deserted and mostly bereft of supplies, unless you count the magazines found on the old racks. You watch him in the corner of your eye until he disappears entirely from view.

Poison doesn't seem concerned. They pick up a magazine and start carding through it without acknowledging their brother's restive twitching whatsoever. In general, Poison can be trusted to gauge when a situation regarding the Kid is serious and when it isn't, so if they're not bothered it's usually safe to assume that you don't have to be ready for all hell to break loose.

That means you can concentrate on keeping an eye on your surroundings, mentally preparing yourself for when _that_ specific version of hell breaks loose. In your time traveling with them, you've grown accustomed to actually getting to spend time at a gas station, whether abandoned or otherwise, without something catastrophic uprooting your life and leaving someone dead, but that doesn't mean you should get complacent. If something comes, if someone heads for you and yours, you need to be ready to prevent it.

When Kobra bursts from the station, laughing triumphantly at a damn near miraculous find of an old stash of pre-war goods, your hand springs to the gun at your hip and twist violently on the spot.

But it's not a disaster. It's not a threat. It is, for once, the Witch allowing you a kernel of good luck - or maybe that's what you've all got Kobra for. True to the words on his helmet, he's managed to bring you all good fortune.

For days after, the interior of the Trans Am smells like peanut butter and gasoline every time you get in the car.

It is, you think, the closest a smell can get to "home" that you can imagine.

****

**\--**

**if we hurry we'll make the morning edition  
'cause everybody likes to read the bad news**

**\--**

The longer you run with them, the more you learn that Ghoul was right about Party Poison. They're not just good at their job, when it comes to ruining BLi's day. They're _exceptionally_ fucking good at it. You watch them fuck up BLi supply convoys and patrols with no casualties and very few injuries and you watch them crib only what they need from the provisional trucks and leave the rest so that BL/ind doesn't necessarily notice and then dramatically increase the security of those trucks to an untenable degree. You watch them plan and time these careful strikes so that there's no foreseeable pattern, so that they're impossible to predict. You listen to them as they listen to Dr. Death's radio station and then tear up draculoid parties that go fanning out into the desert in search of rebels to crush.

Dr. Death says that Battery City is one of the mass-producers of BLi-brand medication, which is why they need supplies ferried to them semi-regularly. They're not self-sustaining in any sense but in the pharmaceutical; there are more pills produced daily in Battery City than there are grains of sand in Zone Four. He also says that there are whispers that BLi is devising a sort of train line to take shipments in and out of Battery City with higher security. Until they do, though, the four of you are scourges that haunt their supply lines and skim away whatever Better Living won't necessarily miss. Fun Ghoul is an old hand at removing any tracking tech that might be present. He's an old hand at stripping wires and parts and fashioning them into something he can use in general, really, to the point where you have to wonder if he was a microchip or a smelthead in his first life. The Kobra Kid can't piece bombs together the way the Ghoul can, but he has a good handle on how things come together - refines his BLi vending machine hacking tech and goes and names it a _Vend-A-Hack_, and then promptly starts work on some other gadget with a purpose you can only guess at. It's meant to be worn on the hand like a gauntlet, whatever it is, but you don't recognize the buttons that he solders onto the thing or how he intends to make it work.

When you're not ripping goods from BLi trucks and getting shot at and actually getting shot and almost getting killed and just generally running as far and as fast as you can throughout the desert, you're digging roots into the dust. You learn the names of crews that are warm to you, that will trade with you. Poison's got a friend in a quintet of rubberburners headed by a 'joy by the name of Riptide, who you learn has ties to certain avenues in the Zones that the rest of you do not. They have a firecracker spirit and a stubborn resolve that you think is liable to get them killed. It's a shame that it's the case - you like the one-legged and wild-haired Nitro Spice and the quiet, bright-eyed Storm Brio that run in Riptide's box of crayons. But you've carried enough souls for the Witch's sake; you can't shoulder any others.

Crews like Riptide's can afford to get into dire straights with BL/ind if they so choose, so they can get you almost anything in the way of the goods rich in caffeine and sugar that Dr. Death Defying favors, as long as you provide their crew with goods in turn. And with the rate you plunder the more standard supply convoys, you can. You trade battery packs for alcohol and meds that make a little more bearable the nights where your stomach decides it's had enough of the shit you've been feeding it. Most of the time you're the only one who'll sample goods like chicken soup pills before passing them on to Dr. Death; you don't have the hardwired disdain for meds that the others do.

It's difficult to stay under the radar - to be both significant within the Zones and yet invisible to BLi in equal measure. It's a tenuous line, and one that Poison is careful to straddle. Crash kids like Riptide's are considerably keener to throw themselves against BL/ind's resources, to purposefully spark violence and incite retribution. It's because of 'joys like them that you can pass, at least for a time, as a negligible threat to the city. You never take so much that you become notable. You never hit them so hard and so frequently that you become easily recognized.

The Zones tell a different story. Fun Ghoul and the Kobra Kid are recognized at one of Chow Mein's places, and a handful of gangly motorbabies beg them for a slash of color over their masks or their guns or their jackets, just so they could boast the stitched-mouth grin that Ghoul's taken to leaving on things, or the symbol of Kobra's hissing snake. One night, a station you recognize as DJ Hot Chimp's starts blaring a song that features Party Poison as a central object of someone's affection, or maybe their hatred (you're not sure which), and Poison immediately and expressionlessly switches it off. A Zone-rat maintaining a Dead Pegasus station tells you, while you're refueling the Trans Am, that they saw Jet Star and the Kobra Kid take down thirty dracs solo. You aren't wearing your blue-and-red mask nor your lightning-struck helmet at the time so you can't exactly claim otherwise, though you think the rat assumes that your bemused expression means to imply you don't believe them. More than once, you learn that someone's splashed the crew's spider symbol over the edges of buildings and even on one of the mailboxes, outlining its long, tapering legs in dark ink.

Like it or not, you're making names for yourselves. It's unavoidable.

Scarecrows don't come for you. You don't have prices on your heads. You're no more or less of an annoyance, no more or less a proverbial gadfly to BL/ind than any other band of motor-rats and dust angels. But your symbols are starting to take a power and a life unto themselves. It leaves Poison prowling the perimeter of the places where you sleep, has them camped out underneath the midday sun or the scatter of stars as they repaint their mask, clean their gun, inventory your supplies. More and more now, you're both awake at the same time even when you shouldn't be. It's eating at them.

You tell them that you could hide, if you needed to. Lie low. Let the heat burn off. You already know what their answer will be, and you're not surprised when they shake their head.

"That ain't what tomorrow needs."

That's not their way, however much they might need to hear that the way is open to them. They don't refuse to take hits because it gets rough. They accept the consequences. They shoulder burdens. That's what it means to be a leader, which they are - the leader of your quartet in four colors, and the one who chooses to take fault when things go wrong, even when they shouldn't (even when the blame should fall to you). They don't run from a challenge, and what are repercussions but another sort of undertaking? 

This is the life of killjoy. You run hot, hotter than anything. You burn out your engines. You're going to die young and you're going to die messy. The symbols you wear on your jackets and painted on your car have already assumed a life of their own. You've given people something that they'll hold to. 

In that, you've given them a power. Who would you be to take that away?

To shrug off that responsibility would mean that if it won't be the four of you, it'll be somebody - anybody - else. Charging into that fire, taking that risk.

"It's gotta be us," says Poison, softly. "Gotta be us that carries it."

You don't need to ask what they mean by that.

It should be you who carries that weight, rather than someone who did not ask for it, or someone who did not deserve it.

****

**\--**

**they've tapped the phone  
be very careful what you say**

**\--**

Dr. Death has a job for you. By now you've met his runner, his courier, his roller-skating speed demon who goes only by the very indicative name of Show Pony, so their visits aren't so out of left field. They like to give you unsolicited advice, which you've taken to ignoring whenever possible. You don't need suggestions on how best to present yourself to others. You've been figuring out how to do that for most of your life.

This go around, they're exceptionally secretive about whatever role you might play in this job of the Doctor's, though this isn't exactly uncharacteristic of them. They're palpably intensive about it, though - more so than usual.

"You're in or you're out on this one," says the Pony.

As if any of you are going to refuse the Doctor flat out. You, for one, owe him too much for that, and Poison's never turned down a job from him yet. While they're not always _exactly_ what he says they are, they're always worth your while. There aren't any objections to assuring the Pony that you're interested. They ride with you back to Dr. D's station.

There, Dr. Death Defying tells you a story.

"Don't believe any of you fought in the Analog Wars," he says in his long and steady drawl whose rhythm has long since become familiar to you. He'd kept you company on plenty of late nights before you had anyone else, when it was just you and the radio and Dr. D to croon away the innate terror of your solitude. "Imagine that was before your time."

You never fought in the Analog Wars, no. You know them because you grew up when they blistered the horizon, when they burned like sunfire into the sands, so fierce and so hot that it felt like it would scorch the desert into molten glass. You remember them by the sound of sirens and the shrill of every radio transmission going off at once - every station shrieking in grief and terror at imminent defeat. You remember the Analog Wars by the orange-red sky and its snowfall of ash that dusted your shoulders and your hair. You remember what it meant to swallow smoke, when Zone Seven disappeared clean off the map.

None of the other three say anything. Kobra jams his hands into his pockets and looks at the ground. The Ghoul shrugs. Poison simply looks at Dr. D in silent invitation for him to continue.

"Ended a few years back," says the Doctor. "Fucked up my legs good 'n proper, but before they ended, we had a leader. She was..." He pauses, then shakes his head. "She was somethin' else. Brighter'n anything we'd known. She was headin' the charge, incitin' the masses. She had a following behind her. And a lot of us, _most_ of us - " His tone drops. "We thought she could do it. That was the thing. We really thought she could do it."

You know how this story ends. You were awake and in mourning the night it happened. You heard the transmissions.

You keep quiet.

"...didn't shake out." Dr. Death leans back in his chair, his casual and conversational disposition restored. "BLi vaporized Zone Seven. Ended the Wars, caught our fearless leader, and strapped that draculoid mask over her like it was nothin'. Wanted to send a message. Wanted to teach us all what'd happen if we messed too badly with the powers that be."

You wonder if he was there for it. If he saw it.

He doesn't say.

"But there was somethin' they weren't bankin' on." Now the Doc seems, suddenly, much more animated. The defeat and frustration that usually outlines his silhouette tenses up, becomes alight with something that reminds you of the man who saved your life, who shot out a group of dracs before they could bag you and the crew you used to run with. The fight's not really left him. He's just taken it to a different front. 

The Wars failed, but that doesn't mean that the battle's over. Now it's fought on air-waves and pirate frequencies. It's fought on digital frontlines, with more than rayguns and wishful thinking. Now it's strands made of radio-waves that bind you all together, and keep the desert under a united front.

All it needs is the people to lead it. Again.

"Our leader, she was pregnant," says Dr. Death. "We didn't know it. BL/ind didn't know it. Hell, I'm not sure they put it together 'til it was obvious. But now they got this kid of hers. They got this kid and they're keepin' her shut up in one of their reeducation centers, and I'm willin' to bet that it's because they know she's something_special."_

A shiver lights up down your spine at the word. _Special._

It could mean anything. But the weight that Dr. Death infuses the word with is almost electrifying.

"Special?" echoes Poison with a frown. "Special _how?"_

"You think they'd assign this girl her own bodyguard unit headed by one of BL/ind's best scarecrows if she weren't special?" Dr. Death counters. "Think they'd build a special little cell just to keep her there for fun? They know something's up with her. Don't think they know what." He doesn't say if _he_ even knows what. "But once she's old enough, they're gonna start dosin' her up and druggin' her outta her mind, the way they do everybody in Battery City. And we..."

He hesitates, as though mentally debating something to himself. Then he shakes his head and continues:

_"I_ owe her. Her mom, she never went on to the Witch. This kid's her only legacy. All we got left of her. And I'll be damned if I let her grow up in those city walls."

"How d'you _know_ all this?" says Poison. Their eyes are narrowed in obvious suspicion. As far as you know, they don't have much reason to be when Dr. D has never led any of you wrong before, but this occasion is already different for several reasons, not the least because none of the jobs he's ever had you run have required this much prefacing. That, and you have a sickening feeling that you know exactly what he's going to ask of you.

"We got eyes and ears on the inside," says Dr. Death shortly. "People who took a lotta risk to find this intel and get it back to us."

Which means that he's got to make it worthwhile. Which means that, by extension, _you_ do.

"Y'really think this girl's..._special?"_ Ghoul draws the word out skeptically. "Like, she ain't Witch-touched or nothin' like that, is she?"

"I believe that she could be something extraordinary." The Doctor folds his hands together. You can't tell if he's looking anyone in the eyes, but there's a frank simplicity to the words, even as he chooses them carefully. He hasn't answered Ghoul's question. "And even if she ain't...there's never been nothing or no one like her. A kid born from a drac? You wanna let BL/ind decide what to do with her?"

Poison grimaces. Kobra looks away, at the door. A muscle in Ghoul's jaw twitches.

"Look," says Dr. Death, regrouping. "I'm asking 'cause if anyone could do it - it'd be you four. And you're free to tell me to find someone else for the job, 'cause this is a stunt that most people're callin' impossible, and not for no reason. You don't wanna tango that close with death, you're entitled to that. But, ah." 

He slides off his sunglasses so he can look each of you in the eye this time. No bluff. Nothing but complete and utter sincerity. It's an off-kilter look on him - the voice of the desert, who's more often than not putting on a show for his listeners. All the DJs do, to an extent.

"Wouldn't ask this of anybody else. Truth be told, I'm not sure anyone else would be able to pull it off."

He lets the station descend into silence.

You can already see everyone else's eyes sliding over to Poison as they stand, back taut, arms crossed across their chest, every muscle in their high-strung, wire-tight body held rigid and tense.

They look up at the rest of you, one by one.

Kobra's the first to answer. He shrugs one shoulder.

"Been meaning to test out that new power glove," he says, which for him is what passes for consent.

Behind him, Ghoul smirks. As if he needs incentive to raise a little hell.

And at that point, it's hardly a choice at all, is it? If you refuse, some part of you thinks that might be it - that Poison will turn down the Doctor's job in turn, because if not all four of you are aligned, then it's not a unanimous decision. But maybe it won't be. Maybe Poison will make the call anyway, and you'll have to contend with that. Or, worse, they could elect to leave you and your dissent behind. It's never happened before, but you have never been asked anything of this magnitude before. Without your keen eye and sharp shot, the odds, already skewed against your kind, would tilt even further.

You're not leaving another crew to rot. Not again. And besides - you've buried enough children in your lifetime. You'd prefer not to bury another, literally or otherwise.

So you rest one hand on Poison's shoulder and give it a single, bracing squeeze.

Their smile is the same wild-edged, slightly pained thing that it always is, and it stabs the same fresh ache into the recesses of your soul that it always does.

"All right," says Poison, cocky and self-sure, as if agreeing to a run through Zone Five and not some suicidally impossible task, "why not?"

Dr. Death breathes out. Something about the smile he shoots back seems shaky, like he has to work to conjure it up.

"We've got city layouts," he says. "Word of an access tunnel the scarecrows use to get in and outta the Zones - "

"Thanks, but no thanks," says Poison, _unbelievably_ waving the help away. "We won't need it."

They don't stick around long enough to read the incredulity that barely makes it into Dr. D's expression before he shutters it off with what must have been an impressive effort. You catch it, though, and you won't pretend you're not inclined to agree with him.

"Uh, _Party?"_ Poison exits the station and Ghoul is at their back almost at once, loudly voicing the concern that you think just about everyone shares: "What the _hell."_

"We won't need 'em," says Poison with an airy confidence that does not in any way suit the task they've just agreed to do.

"We won't need _all the help we can get?"_ says Ghoul. "You tryin' to get us all ghosted?"

"BL/ind's gonna expect that." Poison pops open the door to the Tran Am's passenger seat and starts digging around in the glovebox. The words _RUN AWAY WITH ME_ are mounted up on the dashboard. When Poison emerges, they've got a battered map of the Zones in hand, which they promptly unfold across the car's hood.

You all gather around by predetermined rote. You and Ghoul at either side of Party Poison, with Kobra just a couple steps back and to the left of them.

"Access tunnels for crows?" Poison scoffs and flicks the hair back from their eyes. "That's high security. Won't make it halfway through those tunnels before we get alarms, and then we'll have every pig in the City crawlin' up our asses."

"So...what? We just walk in?" says Ghoul, dryly.

"Nah." And then Poison grins. "But close."

****

**\--**

**speak in code about singing birds and sleepy-eyed women  
autographs only taught me how to counterfeit signatures on my prescriptions**

**\--**

What you end up doing instead is almost as stupid. Ghoul blows up chunks of the exterior walls with mass amounts of homemade napalm, and Party Poison drives the Trans Am directly into the city before the smoke's even cleared. You do this drop in the dead of the night - not the early morning or late evening, when killjoys gather in their biggest numbers and therefore when city security is highest. You do it in the night when citizens are off the streets and no one's expecting much to go Costa Rica, much less four rebels going careening through the place with all the brainless audacity of a detonator with heat stroke.

The way Poison sees it, there'd be no way in hell that you'd be able to pull off this plan quietly. You can't bust into the city and steal a high-security asset right out from BL/ind's nose without someone noticing and promptly shutting you down. So instead of waiting for the trouble to find you, Poison aims to _be_ the trouble instead. They'll stir up the chaos of their own volition and use it as your smokescreen when it's time to redline out.

You have to admit that there's a method to the madness, to the weaponizing of their unpredictability. It's a move so bold, so direct, so unbelievably and unbearably _stupid_ that BL/ind wouldn't expect anyone to do it, much less pull it off. So there aren't a lot of safeguards against the possibility of a quartet of killjoys steering a pre-war Pontiac Trans Am through streets that certainly weren't outfitted to bear auto-vehicles, which is how you get your foot in the door.

It's the first time you've been in the city. 

Even under the cover of night, there's not much to see. It's cramped and unsettling; almost everything is in varying shades of black and white and gray. The skies overhead paint them all a dark blue, but that doesn't change how little variation there is to the architecture. It reminds of you how Dust Devil described the way the world was: _canyons made of skyscrapers._ Only then it had sounded grandiose and exciting, and here it just obstructs your view of the sky with tall, glittering buildings that stretch too far into the heavens. You think you see housing blocks stacked high and multi-storied, with dark hatches of windows set into the walls, but everything's whipping by so fast that you can hardly take in the sights.

That's just fine with you. While there's certainly space between buildings, the inability to scan the horizon at a glance spawns a cold knot of fear in your gut. Almost everything fans out from the epicenter of the broad landmarks that, thanks to Poison, you know as the _Battery Towers_. They're easily the tallest structures in the city. 

To you, they're potential cover first and buildings second. You've only got the one exit route, and it's the smoking gap that the car's left in its wake. There are a lot of places for pigs to duck and hide compared to you. They know this city, and you don't. But this task was never going to be to your advantage.

You decide pretty quickly that you don't think you care for Battery City, and you'd prefer to die outside of it. If it's all the same, though, you'd rather die after the _chamba_ is finished.

Naturally, you've got no idea where you're headed. That's why Poison's the one driving. They navigate these streets like they still know them, and for all you know, maybe they do. Your task is to shoot down the first responders with the Kobra Kid while Poison breaks into the facility where they're keeping your target. 

They slam the car into park, leave the motor idling, and clamor out of the driver's seat so the Kid can take their place.

The smell hits you before anything else: rancid and bitter and clinging to the roof of your mouth. Several cans' worth of gasoline run dark and laminar over the tarmac in Battery City. Dr. Death, to better facilitate your success, had been willing to lend you all the supplies you needed. 

Then the laser fire starts flying. Exterminators pile onto the streets. You don't waste battery power blowing them into pulp and ash. You crouch and duck behind the car when the second blast goes off - a rushing curtain of sheeting flame that goes shooting up from the gas-slick ground.

Ghoul's right on schedule.

Poison doesn't wait any longer. They've got one of the Ghoul's blinking-light bombs in hand as they tear forward and hurl it at the low barriers the exterminators are using as cover. Those aren't sufficient protection against an improvised fuel-oil explosive, and you watch pieces of the pigs go spraying the walls and painting them a red to match Poison's hair.

Party Poison is violent and incendiary and unstoppable and their soul pulses with a brighter fire than anyone's you've ever met. This entire endeavor is wholly and completely impossible by its very design, but watching them rip through the city and shoot out the windows and charge into a high-security re-education facility without a break in their stride or a shade of hesitation, you can almost believe that it could succeed. They move like nothing can cut them down - not dracs, not scarecrows, not death, not the Witch Herself. They take the unthinkable and make it real by pure force of will. You watch them shoot out building windows and know that you'd follow them to the edge of the universe.

You'd follow them through to hell itself, assuming that you're not already living it.

But that's not what you're here to do right now. Right now you're hunkered down behind the Trans Am for cover. The smoking craters taken out of buildings and the skid marks laid out over the streets mean that you won't have to worry about your tails just yet, but you're keeping the corner of your eye on the area just in case. It doesn't take long for you to have to start shooting, once the worst of the gas-fire dies down and the dracs emerge from the rubble, clamoring curiously over toppled chunks of white plaster. Some of them don't even have time to get their guns out before you're dusting them on the spot. The smoke makes it hard to get a bead on them, but this is intentional. According to Kobra and Ghoul, Battery City employees don't fire unless they know they won't waste battery power, so obscuring their vision is the best strategy you have, which is why Ghoul's not holding down the car with you. You've got your helmet on, and so does Kobra. That mitigates the worst of it.

Maybe five minutes later, Poison's back out, gun in one hand and a girl held against their hip with the other. She really is young - if you had to guess, you'd say maybe three or four. She's clinging tight to Poison's jacket, little hands fisted into the leather, huddled up against them for protection.

You're already moving out from behind the car. Kobra guns the engine and the car roars forward, tires slipping over trace gasoline while you blast the remaining exterminators that come seething for you. Poison's running for the Trans Am, but their cargo is slowing them down and they take a hit to the shoulder. A stray laster blast shatters one of the car windows. An exterminator nearly gets lucky enough to cut you down, and you shoot it dead before it can get another opening. Up close, their uniforms, featureless and faceless but for the falsely cheery BLi logo, make them excellent targets. You aim for the center of the happy face printed on each and every one of them. 

They keep coming, without limit. Here, though, there wouldn't be a limit. This is Battery City. There's a virtually endless supply of BL/ind employees here. _Come on._ You can't hold this position forever, but Poison's trying to get the girl into the car.

You're losing ground. _Come on!_ The rate of fire is getting untenable. You're in retreat, forced behind the cover of the Trans Am, watching Poison try to keep shooting at whoever's at their back. If nothing else, you can clear their pursuers for them. You duck around, move for the wreckage of the broken-open facility, and - you know the face that looks back out.

You remember it from the hard sting of rain on skin as you lay motionless in the mud. You remember it from three shots to the back of someone's head. You remember it from Titan, still and steaming on the ground. The sound of a bodybag closing over you. Words in your memory: _"Bag this one up for extraction. Leave the rest."_

Your hate has a special kind of taste. It's electric and cold, not unlike the hard _zat_ of a laser, but it sinks into the beds of your teeth and seeds its way into the places between your bones and makes your blood run like ice. It makes your heart roar hard and it makes your vision dim down into a tunnel until it's just you - you and this scarecrow that are the only two people in the world.

You raise your gun.

You should kill it. It wouldn't be enough to simply shoot it. This you know by experience. It wouldn't be enough because scarecrows are so goddamned resilient, because they are _made_ and _manufactured_ to resist almost anything the Zones can throw at them. It wouldn't be enough because the last time you faced a scarecrow it almost killed you, but what out here _hasn't_ by now? Maybe it _would_ kill you. Maybe, for the first time, you wouldn't have _watch everyone else die_ because you'd be taking the steps to prevent it instead.

The scarecrow only has eyes for Party Poison. It's glowering. You'd recognize the set of its features, its bald head, the cut of its clothing, anywhere. After nearly dying in the rain and being bagged for extraction at its request, of course you'd recognize it. 

It's not looking at you. Does it even remember you?

Why would it? You were just one casualty out of the dozens, maybe hundreds, that a scarecrow takes home.

It probably doesn't know you're here.

You could rush it. Years ago, that's what you would have done. That's what you _did._ You ran at the thing that haunted you and it nearly murdered you but it was injured and that's how you got to it _first._ You didn't die even though you probably should have. Someone else died instead, and if this is to be your lot in life then you're going to see how far it will take you -

You raise your gun.

Poison fires. The shot misses, showers the scarecrow with sparks and light instead, and it doesn't even flinch.

You need to breathe.

You could shoot it.

You _could,_ but -

But the job is to get the girl out of the city.

The urge to charge forward, to shake this thing to pieces, to shoot it until it bleeds, to wring its _neck_ and break open its head, smear the contents of its skull against the fucking walls, rip it _apart_ \- it should scare you, how thickly that impulse beats at your throat, for what this thing did to Titan. For what it did to your last crew. For what it's _going_ to do to countless other zonerunners and motor-rats. It should scare you that so much of you _wants_ it, to throw everything aside for the sake of vaporizing this scarecrow where it stands. It doesn't, though, because the last time you developed a grudge for a scarecrow you killed it and it's a crow's helmet you wear now as a trophy, even if it nearly killed _you_ instead.

You could do it. You could _try._ Maybe a year ago, you would have.

But the job -

The job is to get the girl out of the city.

This was the job you agreed to.

You're responsible for a piece of this plan. You're responsible for the signal.

You raise your gun - and you keep raising it. You shoot three times straight up into the air. Three red bolts of light, shooting skyward: that's the signal.

That's when the Ghoul blows one of the broadcast towers and you more or less fling yourself into the passenger seat in time for the Kobra Kid to send the car squealing out from the blast radius. Ghoul is more or less bathed in the cinders he left in the air, but he's laughing wild and reckless when he joins Poison and the girl in the backseat.

His job was to cover your tracks and make sure that you wouldn't have every exterminator in Bat City following you out, and now he's done that. In the ensuing _revolú_, no one's going to be on your asses for a while yet. Kobra's shouting for everyone to get down. Bat City grunts are still shooting at you; the car's going to need a new paint job after this, and it's unfathomable to you that the idea of there being an _after_ to this is actually within striking distance. Ghoul is still cackling, occasionally stopping to shriek something that's mostly incoherent. The rear window is all but shattered by now.

You're not really sure what Kobra's waiting for, so you growl _"gas"_ at him from between gritted teeth and the car rockets forward, back the way it came. A few unlucky dracs who got it in their heads to approach from the back don't stand a chance. The ones that aren't caught under the tires or bulldozed over the hood have to dive out of the way to keep from getting their skulls crushed by the missile of exhaust and gasoline that's become of the Trans Am. 

It feels like too much to hope until you're well and truly clear of the city, and you've gone past its borders. Ordinarily more of you would be shooting from the back to cover your exit, but the idea here isn't to lead anyone on a merry chase; it's to disappear.

You keep waiting for the inevitable. For a BLi blockade up ahead. For a scarecrow-headed pursuit squad to come roaring down the Getaway Mile after you. 

It doesn't come.

BL/ind really and truly didn't see any of it coming. They didn't see _you_ coming.

It almost feels wrong to _hope_ as much.

In the back, the girl has stuck her head out of the window. She's yelling like some sort of wild thing, a tan-colored steak of sound that quickly converts into a shriek of laughter when Ghoul hastily pulls her back inside the car. If you had to guess, you'd say that she's as happy to be rid of BL/ind as you are to be out of their city.

You glimpse Poison in the backseat with her only once. Their expression is a guarded one, which isn't atypical for them, but it also harbors an emotion you can't put a name to.

If you had to guess, you might call it trepidation.

It's what you all knew would happen, assuming this absurd, stupid, impossible mission succeeded. You all agreed to this, knowing that, even on the off-chance that you _could_ succeed, you will inevitably still fail when this brings BL/ind's full wrath down over all your heads. They won't forgive this insult. They'll want her back. They won't allow four outlaws, with their colorful hair and their bright masks and their unrestricted lifestyles full of loud music and strange customs, to survive the infamy that will doubtless stalk the killjoys who were crazy enough to break into Bat City and live.

If they don't kill you, they'll do something worse, and you happen to know that BL/ind is fully capable of delivering on that front. They'll make sure that you still fail in the end.

You've been failing people your entire life, though, so failure doesn't really bother you anymore.

****

**\--**

**his head's a junkyard  
for rusted midnight thoughts**

**\--**

The problem is this.

None of you planned any further ahead than getting the girl _out_ of the city. That was the end-all, be-all. You'd all accepted that it was probable that not all of you would make it, but then you all _did,_ and you all made it back intact on top of it. So now you've got a highly valued BLi asset in the form of a girl too young to be anything but a liability, and some new top priority BLi price-tags on all your heads.

Your newest, smallest accommodation is on the quieter side than you'd expect from a child her age, but you suppose that she would be. BL/ind was keeping her in solitary confinement, the way Poison described the place they found her in. She didn't have anyone to talk to save for maybe the scarecrow unit assigned to watch her. She was probably raised in relative isolation, never knowing anyone besides the caretakers in white who must have fed and cleaned and changed her, never so much as encountering children her own age.

For the moment, she doesn't seem to have anything to say. Mostly she watches the four of you with vague interest, like some part of her knows how to recognize people with a fire in their souls like hers.

Dr. Death said that she was extraordinary. Maybe she is. When you look at her, all you see is a kid. You think your initial assessment was correct; she can't be any older than three or four.

When the sun rises and you've just hit Zone Two after hours of driving, you have to stop to let the Trans Am's engines cool and to get your bearings. It's at that point where Poison finally addresses the girl properly, crouching down so they can talk to her as she stays in the backseat.

"Hey, half-pint," they say, like they're talking to any other adult. "Hope we didn't scare you. Gotta name or anything?"

She simply stares at them. Her eyes are mostly wide and curious and not the least bit intimidated.

"I'm Poison." They tap the center of their chest. "Party Poison."

She stares at them. They give it another ten seconds or so before sighing and pushing themself upright.

"'Kay," says Poison dully, standing. "Someone else try."

"Well, she's gotta get outta the car," says Ghoul. "I'm pretty sure the Doc's not gonna want her sittin' in broken glass."

He watches her for a minute. She looks back at him. Nothing about her suggests that she's taking in anything that's been said to or about her. Or anything that's been said at all.

"All right," the Ghoul says with a shrug. "Upsie-daisy."

Without any warning whatsoever, he darts forward and grabs the kid by the middle so he can lift her out of the car. She complies up until he sets her back down onto the ground, at which point she starts shuffling back with more than a shade of wariness.

It's more reaction than she's given to most things since you cleared the City entirely. Whatever adrenaline and relief had her laughing and screaming out of the open window has long since faded into a chary simmer, so even if her newfound caution doesn't feel terribly childlike, it's enough that some of the tension that's been clinging tight to the inside of your chest loosens a hair.

"Get the car running," says Poison of Ghoul and Kobra, who are the logical candidates for the job. To you, they add, "uh, make sure she don't wander off," which is less logical. You're not sure if you're the oldest of this lot but you very well might be, to say nothing of the fact that you virtually tower over this small girl.

But it's what Poison's asked of you, and you're the only one left to do it.

You sigh and sit down next to her, just to diminish the difference in height between the two of you. She stares at you for a minute, then scoots a few inches back. The fact that she hasn't been reprimanded for putting distance between herself and the rest of you seems to have emboldened her slightly.

You have no idea how to address small children. You decide that it can't be that much different from talking to anyone else, because that's the only guideline you have.

"Hi," is all you've got.

The girl continues to look at you.

You suppress another sigh.

_Great._

****

**\--**

**he's criminally carefree  
when the pills swallow the worry**

**\--**

The fact that the girl is so unnervingly restrained speaks entirely too much as to the conditions in which they kept her. The other three can at least agree that she probably wasn't medicated, since she isn't exhibiting any of the symptoms they associate with withdrawals, but between the four of you, you have no clue how you're supposed to take care of this small, strange child who Dr. D swore up and down was special in ways you couldn't imagine. It turns out that she's old enough to eat solid food, and she doesn't seem to find half a can of Power Pup disagreeable as a meal. After about two days, she finally starts talking. It's mostly small things, little answers to yes-or-no questions. _Are you hurt?_ No. _Are you sick?_ No. _Do you want to go back?_ No. _Do you have a name?_ A shrug.

So to all of you, she's the Girl. She's Firecracker, _Chica_, Little-Bit, Atom Bomb, Half-Pint, Babygirl, Fun-Size, and half a dozen other iterations. She knows when she's being addressed.

Whenever anyone mentions the city, the Girl shuffles a little bit closer to whoever's nearest. Once she grabs the Ghoul's hand and clings to it in a motion that seems mostly instinctive, because she releases it almost at once and then looks guiltily at the ground. You catch the Ghoul's surprised blink, but he recovers quickly.

"C'mon, pumpkin," he says, as easily as if he's addressing any one of the crew, and holds out his hand to her. "Don't worry 'bout the city. We're faster'n them. Killed more dracs than you can shake a stick at, or whatever."

The Girl smiles a little, but you can see how tightly she grips the proffered hand, and how her shoulders have drawn up.

Right away, BL/ind proves how badly they want her back. Dracs and exterminators are already combing the Zones in search of you. You start to see your faces in magazines on the gas station racks almost immediately, even the ones out here. Sometimes the walls of old buildings are stuck with posters. It's strange to see those reflections of yourself staring back at you, distorted and not altogether accurate for the most part. They're almost entirely in black and white, save for the red tint of Poison's hair. The hue is notably diluted, as though the City doesn't want to acknowledge to its citizens that someone so vibrant could exist in the desert. You're not sure how it is they've managed approximations of each of your features, given that you were all masked or helmeted when you broke into the City.

There are black bars over each of your eyes, with the white words in all-caps printed across: _**EXTERMINATE**_. There aren't any names to go with your likenesses, but there's a hefty thousand-carbon reward for each one of you.

"Oh, fuck off," says Ghoul, the first time he sees his portrait. "Look at this. They gave me glasses. Like some kinda nerd." He holds up his poster and makes a face before ripping it up.

"Computer reconstruction," says Kobra. He examines his own with a critical eye. "'Least they got the jacket right." Their rendition of his jacket is the same dulled red as Poison's hair. They must have felt shakiest about his features, because he still has sunglasses in his headshot.

"Ha! Ha ha, oh _fuck_, Jet." Ghoul again, grinning as he holds up your own portrait. "What the _fuck?"_

It's not a very accurate rendition. They made you look older than you are, and your hair hangs limp, almost bedraggled to your shoulders, instead of fuzzing out semi-wildly like it generally does. How they got even a vague notion of what you look like beneath your helmet is anyone's guess, though by now you've probably hit enough supply trucks in Zone One for the odd exterminator to have gotten a plausible look at you. Like the other three, your eyes are obscured. You suppose that must be because of how, like the other three, you've taken to wearing a mask or your helmet whenever you go up against Better Living.

Only Poison looks like themself. Their chin is up and their head is tipped back - as though, even with some of their features a bit off and their expression mostly hidden, they're still angling to sneer defiantly at whoever looks their way.

The real thing looks at you, and their expression twists subtly. You can see your worry reflected in their face, in all the minute ways they signal their concern to you. Their smiles don't flare as brightly. Their laughter sounds forced.

It doesn't take long for BL/ind to follow up on the threat of those bounties on your heads. They track you down all the way into the middle of Zone Three, where drac raiding parties don't generally tend to roam unless they've got a good reason for it. It's only a few days since your successful expedition in and then back out of Battery City, and ideally you'd be getting the girl back to Dr. Death so he can relocate her to whoever's _really_ going to take care of her, because god knows none of you have ever handled a child before and you're not entirely sure where to start. You only ever handled the dead ones, back at Gertie's. It's not like they could cry or complain when you couldn't meet their needs.

You don't get the chance to pass her off to Dr. D, though, or at least not right away. A band of dracs tries to head you off - they pull up behind the Trans Am while Poison's driving and simply start shooting.

"Geddown!" They half-turn to ensure that the Girl is listening, but she's already clambering off the seat of the car to huddle down by your feet. Her instincts are good. It seems that, during her stint in Battery City, she didn't learn to harbor many positive associations with the ever-present draculoids.

The route back to Dr. D's takes longer than it should. Despite all the doubling back Poison tries, despite every trick they enact to lose your new shadows, the four of you still wind up scrapping with dracs every other day. They're relentless, and BL/ind has a seemingly limitless supply of them.

It's because of this that it takes about two weeks to get back to Dr. Death in person - an impossibly long time, considering that traveling the Zones seldom if ever takes more than a few days at the most if you know how to pace yourself. But between the bands of dracs that you've found yourselves attracting more and more and your seemingly fruitless efforts to shake every tail that manages to lock into pursuit, it's something like sixteen days before you can risk stopping by Dr. Death's station. It's been an estimated fifty hours since your last clap, which is a new record since you crashed BL/ind's party. That's the safest you've been in the span of those sixteen days.

"I was beginnin' to think you'd redlined out to the Radiation Belt," says Dr. Death when Poison bulls in, harried and jumpy. Their eyes dart furtively about as they take in the exits. They haven't slept for more than a few hours a night in all those two weeks, you know, and you know this because you haven't been sleeping much either.

Most of the time it was your own nervous energy boiling in your gut, but sometimes it was the girl. She's quiet even when she cries, or at least she tries to be. It doesn't do much when half of you are already awake to begin with.

"Had dracs on our tail the whole time," says Poison, their voice rasping slightly with exhaustion. "They want her back, D. They want her back bad."

"You all really pulled it off." You're lucky that you're not the type to be offended that the Doc would ever imply otherwise, considering that he asked for the four of you, specifically, to do this job. But he sounds quietly shocked all the same, like he can't quite believe it. "And she's...?"

"She's fine," says Poison, dismissive. "She runs, she jumps, she cries, she does all the things little kids do. Or the things they're _supposed_ to do." They shrug at that one, as if to say _how would I know?_ You frown a little. If they were raised in the city -

Well, if they were raised in the city, you suppose that makes sense. They _wouldn't_ know what children are supposed to do. That's the entire reason that so many city rats try to make their way _out_ of those walls in the first place.

"Well, gettin' her out was the easy part." The Doc's tone borders on sympathetic. "It's _keepin'_ her out that's gonna be the tough bit. I've been callin' around, seein' if there're any crews out there that'll take her - "

"What?" Poison goes still and stares at him. "D, you fuckin' serious?"

"Yeah," says Dr. Death, drawing out the word as though it should be obvious. "That job's put targets on all your heads. I never seen Bat City put out _bounties_ for any of our own before."

"So you want us to hand the heat off to whoever's willing?" snaps Poison. "They ain't gonna stop. You said you wouldn't ask this of _anybody_ else. We were the best for the job."

"You were the best to get her outta there," the Doc answers readily. "But you said it yourself. They won't slow down for this. You spat on their doorstep, and now the BL/ind pigs are all glitched off about it."

"You pass her off to anybody else, they're dead," says Poison. "They're dusted in a week. You said we were the best. Did you mean that, or were you just _talk?"_

"Party," says Dr. Death, slowly.

"Nah." Poison overrides him smoothly. "I ain't watchin' some other crew get ghosted 'cause they can't handle this kinda heat. They know what they're signin' up for if they take her? 'Cause we did."

They're right on that count. You all drove straight into the heart of Battery City, knowing full well you might not all come back out. Instead you emerged with plus one to your number, and you hadn't considered what might happen to her after you got her to Dr. Death Defying's station, but now that you're being forced to consider it, the point Poison raises is a good one. Who _would_ be able to keep her safe? It'd have to be another crew - it'd have to be someone non-stationary, someone used to this kind of life, someone who can fend for their own. And it would have to be someone willing to make sacrifices for the sake of a child, maybe even at the _expense_ of one of their own.

There aren't a lot of crews in the Zones who will go to those lengths. Dust Devil wouldn't have. And thinking back, you're not entirely sure that Doublestar would have either. She took _you_ in, but you weren't a high-security BL/ind asset, and she knew your mother...

You're getting distracted.

"Partyyy." Ghoul breezes in, one hand combing up through his dark hair and mussing it up further. "'M sick of flyswattin' duty out there, and the kid's gettin' antsy." He blinks and frowns to himself. "Both kids. Actually. Uh, we motorin' outta here or what?"

"Nononono, you little shit - fuck!" That's Kobra just behind him, chasing the Girl as she darts into the station at Ghoul's heels. Then she sees Dr. Death Defying, and stops to stare.

There's not much space in the station for six people, even if one of them is pint-sized. It's starting to feel a bit cramped. You automatically start drawing into the nearest corner, as though that might compensate for your height.

"Don't leave the _car_ out there," says Poison, their exasperation audible.

"I didn't," says Ghoul, defensively. "Pony's watchin' it."

_"Pony?"_

"Is that..." Dr. Death is quieter than all of you, but his words manage to cut through Poison's nascent outrage anyway. He's staring at the Girl, his face pale. She stares back, curious and maybe a little bit wary.

Poison takes her hand. She lets them, holding onto it as tightly and easily as if they were her mother. With the number of times they've had to grab her hand to tug her out of a clap, or that you had to pick her up and shield her with your body, or a dozen other times that Kobra and Ghoul have had to make a quick getaway with her in tow, she's grown accustomed to your brand of physical contact over the course of the past two weeks alone. She doesn't seem to mind it. Her standards are probably pretty low, though. You don't think that she got very much of it with the exterminators.

"Yeah," says Poison, and the word carries more than a small note of defiance. "Yeah. It is."

"You really did it, huh," says Dr. D, almost admiring.

Poison lifts their chin. "Was there any fuckin' doubt?"

You swallow back a snort. There was. Quite a bit, actually, but you can recognize Poison's brazen self-assurance for what it is, which is a shield.

"Look," says the Doc, recovering. "You got her out. You need to let this die down before you think of takin' in any more strays."

"Fuck off," mutters Ghoul, though you don't think that barb was really aimed at him.

"It ain't _gonna_ die down, D," snaps Poison. "They want her bad. Hell, they'll hunt us down anyway just for breakin' into the city in the first place." 

The Girl shifts slightly. She's aware she's being discussed while still in the room, and for reasons that are obvious to just about everyone, that's probably more than a little discomfiting. Who knows how much of that she got in Battery City?

"I can't ask you to carry this, Party," says Dr. Death.

"You ain't," says Poison. "You ain't _asking."_

"You can't - " Dr. D stares at the four of you his brow crimping as he grapples with a vocal frustration. "This ain't like takin' in some pet. This ain't something you can drop when it gets too hot."

You can only imagine what the four of you must look like to him: children raising children, fighting a War that's long since been over. He's not wrong. You were the kid that had to learn the cross-wires of the Zones yourself, once. You had to learn the sun, the sand, the constant hunt for water. You had to learn about dracs and how to shoot. You had to learn what it was to lose everyone you knew and you had to learn how to pick yourself up afterward.

But if she's going to be out here, she'll have to learn that anyway. And if she's going to learn it, it might as well be from the people who know it best.

"I dunno," says Poison, stretching the word out languorously. "Whaddaya think, little bit? You like it with us?"

"Yeah," says the Girl, which is the first thing she's said in front of Dr. Death. He looks at her with more than a little surprise.

"Hell yeah, she does! She bit me!" says Ghoul with a bizarre note of pride as he raises his hand to display a small, crescent-shaped mark on his forearm, red against the whorls of ink inlaid into his skin.

Poison looks back at the rest of you - at you and Kobra, who've yet to voice your opinion on this. This is them asking if you're really all right with this, with the unilateral decision they've just made. You're not sure what'll happen if you refuse. But it's hard to think about anything else when the Girl is looking at you too, her eyes clear and her expression guarded.

More guarded than a child's should be. But she's living in the Zones now. It's a good habit to get into.

Like you, she doesn't have a mother. Like you, she'll be raised in the heat and dust. She'll learn to run and she'll learn to fight, like it or not, because that's what being in the Zones does to you. The thought of passing her off to someone who might not understand that clenches something in your chest.

"She's one of us," you say quietly.

"Shit," says Kobra in his characteristic monotone. "Might as well."

Dr. Death Defying looks between the four of you - the _five_ of you - with the air of someone struggling to ascribe some sense to a senseless situation.

"You can't raise a _kid,_ Party."

To that, Poison grins, acid and spitfire.

"Watch me."

****

**\--**

**he's digging like forty nine  
he's making you press rewind**

**\--**

She takes to the life well.

You teach her how to pray to the Witch. You show her what the symbols on your bad luck beads mean, and you teach her letters and numbers, like Doublestar taught you. When her crying rouses you, you sit with her and tell her about the mailboxes, and say that if she really wants to, she can send her words to the Witch and hope that She will guide them to her mother.

You're not sure if that's technically true, since her mother is sealed away beneath a draculoid mask, but it's the only solution you can think to propose. Her letters are still shaky whenever she tries writing them, so at first you script them for her while she tells you what to put down. She goes with you the next time you pass a mailbox, a familiar landmark in Zone Four, and she slides it in with a tremble to her lip. Then she steps away, almost at once, hugs you very tight around your legs (her face only comes up to your thigh) and hurries back to the car.

She grows fast. The next time the Ghoul cuts open his leg on a piece of scrap metal, you show her how you clean and bandage the injury. She takes it in with a furrowed brow and an expression of the utmost seriousness. Ghoul ruffles her hair shakily once it's done, and once _he's_ done swearing in what sounded like three or four different languages.

Dr. Death sends his Pony out after you a few times. At least once they have to help you dispatch a band of dracs when they arrive in the middle of a clap. They always make the proposal to take the Girl of a different crew, and every time they're refused.

"You know this won't stop, right?" The Pony cocks their hip to one side, watching, after the third such offer. Poison has the Girl settled against their hip as they deadeye the Pony in return. She's getting a bit big to be carried, but there's something protective about their stance.

The Girl reaches out, opening and closing her fingers in the direction of Show Pony's helmet. The Pony looks at her, then shrugs and slides it off to give her a better look at it. You've seldom seen the Pony without their headgear, but it's no longer much of a shock to you. They've got long, dark hair and sun-tanned skin and a face that's shockingly pretty, given the nature of the Zones.

Poison sets the Girl onto the ground, and she plunks the helmet down over her own head. It looks massive on her. Pony's expression twists into a smile in a way that seems unintentional.

"Look at you, you little dust angel," says the Pony. "That gear's a bit too big for you, sweetheart."

"Nuh-uh," says the Girl. She grabs it with both hands, as though afraid it might be lifted away.

"I'm afraid so," the Pony says airily. They kneel down so they're almost eye level with her. "Too big for little spitfires like you. That's only for old beauties like me."

Silence. You can picture the Girl's thoughtful, scrunched-nose look.

_"How_ old?" she demands.

The Pony's hesitation is reflected solely in their blink before they answer.

"How old do you think?"

The Girl hums thoughtfully for a moment, then: "Sixteen!"

To her, sixteen must seem ancient.

The Pony laughs, and slips their helmet off her head. Her hair is wild enough that it looks no more or less disheveled than before.

"Tell you what," says Pony. "You guess right one day, and I'll take you skating down the Getaway Mile. Deal?"

"Deal," says the Girl at once. You resist the urge to shake your head at her. She has terrible instincts in negotiation, but you suppose she can't be good at everything.

"She's stayin' with us," says Poison, quieter, as the Girl bounces back toward the car.

"Thought you'd say that," sighs the Pony ruefully. They shake their head, but hold something out to Poison. "Here. In case you need a hand."

It's a handheld radio transmitter. Dr. Death expects you to be running into trouble, then, and often enough to need to call for help. 

He's not wrong. All your usual haunts are barred to you thanks to the slew of dracs that Battery City keeps pumping out in your direction. You all know better than to bring hell and fire down on the After Party just because you're high-strung from the constant firefights and the constant movement and would prefer some liquid calm to cut down on the adrenaline. You can't stop for very long to refuel at gas stations. Gone are the days where you could fuck around for a few hours while Ghoul dredged up diesel from the bowels of old disused fuel tanks. The only times you can afford to be stationary are when you can find an adequate hiding place, or when things are quiet enough to chance letting half the crew sleep while the other half keeps watch.

The posters keep popping up. They end up in more and more of the Zones. Some rats rip them off the walls of stations and paint over them, slap them down outside their own motor dens just for the show of it. Kobra barters for a few spare cans of paint and sprays symbols over some of them. You recognize the icons that have become synonymous with who they represent. Poison is the pill-stencil laid out over the back of their jacket, and Kobra is an open-mouthed snake. Ghoul goes ahead and does his own, which you've seen enough times to recognize now: a face with one x-ed out eye and a stitched-together grin. Kobra offers you a can spraypaint. You consider the colors of your name in your head and grab a can of blue so you can do one for yourself: a star with a lightning bolt sticking out of the side, and a flat expression to suit your own.

The Girl leaves a smiley face in bright, runny yellow. You think it completes the look nicely. You let her ride on your shoulders in victory.

Your faces and your symbols are starting to transcend you. You find your marks sprayed onto the sides of buildings as you're passing through. Someone writes a song about the "Fabulous Killjoys" and lists the four of you by name in the chorus. Murder mags feature shitty mugshots and interviews from someone you recognize: a grim-faced, gray-suited scarecrow. The articles call him "Korse." They say he's one of the best.

You probably should have shot him to death when the window was open to you. You wouldn't have lasted the rest of the way out of the city, most likely, but it would've been worth it.

Dr. Death calls you up whenever you're in range of his station. Even when you're not, you're starting to learn the patterns to the way he slips messages to you through the static. The odd turn of a phrase, the occasional recommendation that anyone headed to a certain Zone "change course," because he's hearing some rumbles. By "change course" he means _"it's Korse,"_ but none of you need to be told _that_ by now.

The five of you end up stopping by his place with escalating frequency. The story is that you're dropping off shit that he needs like liver missiles and nitros in exchange for information. Usually that's the case. Dr. Death updates you on the crow movements and what he's gathered of the city and says he'll send the Pony out with water for you next time you're in the area, to save you a trip to Zone One. Zone One is getting awfully dangerous for four wanted criminals and one wanted asset.

It's not out of the ordinary to see other people in the station aside from yourselves. Dr. Death is a DJ, after all, and he'd be connected intimately to much of the desert. His voice is a cord that lashes everyone together, his station a nexus. After the third visit in as many months with the same sunshine hanging around Dr. D's place every time, Poison cuts to the chase with their typical poise and grace.

"Who the fuck're you?" they snap, apropos of nothing.

The sunshine startles. They're pale, brown-haired, and nothing about them would be noteworthy but for the peeling, reddish splotches on their skin. You've seen those burn-scars before on countless waveheads.

"At ease, soldier," drawls Dr. Death Defying, rolling on past between the two of them. "'S only Cherri Cola. He's an old friend."

He doesn't explain any further. He's not exactly required to, but the answer clearly doesn't reassure Poison, who continues to eye the guy warily.

In response, he hooks his fingers through the chain around his neck. A couple of shiny squares dangle there - dogtags.

Like someone who fought in the Wars.

A warmongering wavie is strange company for Dr. Death Defying to keep, and he keeps company with all of _you._

You watch Cola curiously whenever you see him in the area, but Poison's made their opinion of Cherri Cola quite clear, so you don't say a word. You don't particularly mind that. For all you know, Cola might have personally known the first wavehead you gunned down - the first human life you ever had to take.

And what would you have to say to a wavehead, anyway?

****

**\--**

**he's a thunderstorm so bright you shut your eyes  
he is a hurricane**

**\--**

"If they ever get a hold of you, little bit," Poison counsels the Girl once, "you play dead, got that? Or if that don't work, you stay still and you don't move. We'll come and getcha outta there, all right?"

Do they really expect to always be able to do a thing like that? She's never out of sight for very long; at least one of you always keeps watch on her, stays close by. Poison assigns the Girl to the task of carrying the radio and the transmitter, and she takes to it with pride. She decorates them both with liberal doses of color, assigns stickers and bright spots to each of them. The transmitter gets a helpful instruction of "TALK" painted on the front of it, in case any of you might forget.

Poison shows her where the Battery City water mains are hidden under the sands and how to tap them safely, and which establishments will supply that precious resource for cheap. The first time the five of you run into a bodybag, Poison shows her all the moving parts of it and how you can hide away in one for the night, and how to pick a corpse clean of anything worth taking.

The presence of bodies only bothers her the first few times. She quickly gets used to it, just like how she gets used to how you have to take circuitous routes sometimes to dodge the scarecrows that are keen on taking her back. She gets used to the sight and smell of blood, even when it's coming from one of you. Once Ghoul fumbles his raygun midway through swapping the zap-pack, and the Girl grabs it for him, loads it for him, and hands it back without being asked. She tries her best not to cry when she cuts her finger or skins her knees, and she's quick to pick up what any one of you teach her. Kobra shows her how to work his Vend-A-Hack and she learns it quicker than the Ghoul did. It's like parts of her already know how to live in this place, and she's just remembering. Maybe she is. She might have the same fire as her mother in her soul, like the Doc claims, but you think that it might all be her. You think that power might simply be part of who she would have been, regardless of who her mother was. She wasn't born out here like you were, though she might as well have been. You look at this little Girl with a smile like a sunbeam and legs fast as yours were at her age and the mother she only remembers intermittently, the mother who she cries about less and less as the days creep by, and you are reminded unshakably of yourself.

You were raised on the sun and the sand and the fire and the smell of gasoline. You were raised on the sound of rayguns, and running from dracs, and having to fight as easily as you breathed. You were raised motherless and fatherless, and though you never cried for those things you did not have, you still wear your mother's beads on your wrist alongside Rocket's. They're all you have of her, because your memories are little more than colorless fog; the Girl doesn't even have that much.

You remember, if vaguely, how you were introduced to the life in the Zones. That's the only metric you have for how you're supposed to help raise this Girl, so it's your most valuable framework. 

Above all else, though, you don't want her to have to live like you did. There's only so much you can do to resist that. That doesn't mean you won't try. You might not know how to be pitied, might not take _well_ to it, and you don't think you know how to be loved - but you want to know how to be able to love, and you can only hope that you're doing the right thing in doing so.

The first opportunity presents itself while Fun Ghoul and the Kobra Kid haggle with Tommy Chow Mein for several heated minutes about the price of a handheld rebreather, because all of the filters and helmets on display are too big for the Girl and you all don't want to have to worry about the possibility of her sole protection against any toxic vapors in the air slipping off mid-clap. The Girl is at the Ghoul's side, standing on the tips of her toes to peer up at Tommy Chow Mein, who seems to be doing everything he can to avoid looking at her. You're perusing Chow Mein's stock without much interest when something catches your eye.

It's some dusty old toy, a multicolored robot with arms that can swivel up and down. Despite the wear and tarnish, it's in relatively good condition.

You never had anything in the way of toys, growing up. You had guns. You had words of advice. You had the smell of fuel. You had little besides that which would help you survive.

You did not have a toy robot with moveable arms.

You set it down on the counter beside the rebreather and inform Chow Mein that you'll cover the asking price if you get the robot as a bonus. Chow Mein calls you a thief and a vagabond and you have to negotiate for several minutes more before you're allowed to walk away with your spoils.

"Why?" says Kobra, eyeing the toy in your hands.

To him, you say, "because I said so."

Then you hand it to the Girl and watch as her expression lights up like a struck flare. She clutches it tight to her chest as though hugging it. You shrug and look back at the Kid.

_That's why._

You don't think the Kobra Kid had much in the way of playthings either, assuming any of them did. This world doesn't value children and it doesn't value childhood. Everyone grows up too fast. The Girl, for all her youth and energy, for all that you do your best to give her the protection from the dracs and the white sea of the BL/ind in perpetual pursuit, is already growing up too fast.

You're awake one night while she cries softly, so softly that she doesn't wake the other two. Poison is also, nominally, awake, but they're not keeping watch on account of them being absent, so it's just you when you crouch down next to her.

"Hey."

The Girl sniffles, running a hand hastily over her nose and leaving a shiny trail of snot down her wrist, like that might mask the evidence.

You open your arms, a little uncertainly. Doublestar was never the sort of person to initiate this sort of thing. She placed a hand on your head or rubbed your shoulder when you'd done especially well in a clap, but that contact was brief and fleeting and infrequent at best. It's taken falling asleep with Ghoul slumped against your shoulder or Poison leaned into the crook of your arm for you to learn that there's nothing as calming and bracing as the touch of someone else you fervently trust.

The Girl crawls forward and hugs you tight around your middle, pressing her face into the front of your shirt.

You rub her back gingerly.

"All right, _nena,"_ you whisper. "S'okay to cry."

There's a break in her sniffing, like she's going to speak, but she doesn't. She only hugs you tighter.

Like you, she doesn't need to talk to say what she needs.

You brush the curly fuzz of her hair back from her forehead and, because you can barely speak for the tightness in your jaw, you press a kiss to her temple.

"It's okay," you say again, even if it's not, and you both know it's not; it's one of those little lies that you both learn to believe.

That night, you stay up with her and point out the names of stars. You reach down deep into the wells of memory to recall the constellations that you and Nova Cane once assigned to certain scattered collections of those glistening points in the sky, and you make up fanciful names when you can't recall.

The Girl points at a jagged spray of those distant lights, dimmed by the cover of smoke and pollution, and says, without explanation, "that's you."

You hum slightly, but you think she can tell by the angle of your head that you're confused by the assertion.

"'Cause it's a lightnin' bolt," says the Girl confidently. "'S you."

The pressure that works its way up to your throat is so immense that, again, you can't answer her aloud for a moment. Your smile feels like a wavery and uneven thing.

You can't explain what it is about that assertion that's managed to work its way into the core of you. Maybe it was the confidence with which she said it, or the way she said it like it was obvious. _That's you,_ like maybe once you're dusted, you'll be able to keep watch over her regardless.

You hug her to your side and you can't tell if you want to laugh or cry into her riot of wildly untidy curls. What happens is a little bit of both. Your smile feels uneven and watery and a telltale heat presses up against the backs of your lids when you close your eyes.

If you had to pick one moment that guaranteed, more than any other, that you would give everything and anything to ensure that this Girl never has to live underneath the rule of the BL/ind ever again, it would have to be this: her small body leaned up against yours, the both of you tucked underneath the scatter of faded stars.

You want her safety, her _happiness,_ her _future_ so badly that it hurts, that it rips at your heart and renders you wholly unable to speak.

All your life, you don't know if you've ever loved anyone or anything more than you do her.

And it scares the shit out of you.

It's the most wonderful and terrifying thing in the world, and you wouldn't trade it for anything.

****

**\--**

**i get bright ideas in dark rooms  
red rooster combs on our head**

**\--**

The news starts to travel that the Fabulous Four have picked up a kid. Most don't believe it until they see it. When they do, they get these looks on their faces like they're about to burst out laughing, but you only have to fold your arms or crack your knuckles, like the way you remember Titan used to, and they quickly learn to shut the fuck up. You're not as hulking as they were, but your expression is stony enough and your 'drobe is black enough for it to do the job. Eventually, it doesn't matter if Party Poison is carrying out a deal with a little girl in tow, or if the Ghoul enlists her to help carry some of his demo-gear to a drop point. You're the Fabulous Four. You know what you're doing.

Even if you don't. You're flying by the hood of your car, the same as you always have, only now there's a lot more at stake than four dust-rats born in smoke and gasoline. The prices on your heads jump from a thousand carbons apiece to five, and then to ten. The day you hit a fifty thousand carbon reward for just _one_ of you, the Ghoul flips a coin to the Kobra Kid and the latter tucks it into his jacket pocket with a satisfied smirk.

It makes it easier, you know, to make games of the unrelenting and ever-increasing strain over time as Better Living aches to get its hands on each of you.

Dr. Death calls in semi-frequently, and you stop by more and more often. He says he's getting more calls about the five of you, and more calls asking about your young charge. He says the desert's alive with whispers. He says some of them are starting to realize who she is, and why she's so special.

"That Girl," says Dr. Death one night, "is gonna set us all free."

You believe him.

The words stick with you when you watch her lick the thread so she can wiggle it through the eye of a needle and then start to pull the apposed edges of your torn skin together. You never taught her how. 

The words stick with you when you note the smoothness of her movements when she helps the Ghoul aim the bazooka, and when she changes the batteries for the Kobra Kid's gun. You turn those words over and over in your head when you notice that your raygun always holds a charge when it's in the Girl's hand. The words are still there, in the back of your mind, when you watch her carry her portable radio everywhere she goes. It never dies. The signal never wavers, when it sits next to her. Once you wave her close to ask if you can check it over for a moment, because you're worried that it might be running its batteries down. The Girl shrugs and hands it over.

Ten minutes later, you hand the radio back and assure her that it will last for a long, long time as long as she takes good care of it.

_That Girl is going to set us all free._

At the same time, Better Living grows all the more determined to ensnare her. You start to recognize the names that get blasted on the airwaves - the names of other 'joys you've run into, done and dusted with increasing frequency. Sometimes the crow that did it leaves a calling card, but usually he doesn't need to. You all know who's responsible, and so does the rest of the desert.

When you visit Dr. Death Defying next, Show Pony grabs the Girl up in a gleeful spin that's starting to become routine for the pair of them and demands to know if she's old enough to learn to skate across car-tops yet.

"No," you and Poison say in blunt synchronicity. Pony makes a face at both of you. You don't answer. You move to the back of the station, a place that's rapidly becoming your routine position of choice, so you can take in the station interior and watch the exit all from the same angle. Ghoul is outside gassing up the car while the Kobra Kid makes some further adjustments to his power glove, which you've now seen in action enough to know it can crack drac necks with devastating, automated force. The Girl laughs, guessing Show Pony's age at a brave choice of _five hundred._

Poison's watching Cherri Cola with a familiar suspicion, even if Cola is, as far as you can tell, doing nothing objectionable. Cola's always twitchy whenever any of you stop by, but you think it might get worse with Poison around. When they spend the whole time eyeing him like he's some kind of rabid dog, you can't say you don't understand why he might be wary. It's obvious that he's trying not to let on how much their persistent staring is bothering him. He's not very good at hiding it.

When Dr. D has you all clear out so he can run his broadcast, the Pony departs with a smart salute in the Girl's direction and a bag of something or another around one shoulder as they go skating off along the nearest strip of road. The day is a welcome, lazy simmer; you don't have any dracs to dodge and news of Korse has ground to a standstill, which means it's likely that the scarecrow's back in his cage for the time being. For once, you get to be at ease, or as close as a Fabulous Killjoy gets to it.

Poison is like their brother in more ways than you think they realize. Like the Kobra Kid, they don't take well to downtime without distraction. Right now the Kid is wholly occupied with showing the Girl how to paint a raygun with Ghoul, but Poison has no such outlet. They've been brimming with nervous energy for days now, and there's only one direction for it to go.

They're sat on the roof of the car, tapping at the handle of their gun with their fingertips, and you can feel the tension coiling up along the rope of their spine as they wind back and - 

"D trusts you," says Poison. The words are casual, but the way they pitch them forward makes them sound like a warning.

You shift against the Trans Am very slightly. You don't look their way. You keep watching Kobra and the Girl and Ghoul, but you can tell by the stillness in Poison's stance that they know you're listening.

"He's a friend," says Cola, though the words have a stutter to them and they take a long moment to emerge.

"D's friends with a lotta people," says Poison, dismissive.

Again, Cola seems to struggle to form a response.

"But you're...you."

"And you're you. Don't explain why you're staying with him." Poison can be fucking merciless about this sort of thing. You almost feel bad for the hapless Cherri Cola, who definitely knows who they are but hasn't experienced the arbitrary wrath of Party Poison, arch and incendiary leader of the Fabulous Killjoys, firsthand.

Cola's twitches are worse than the Kobra Kid's. You recognize the jitters, and they're not pure nerves. You recognize them from when Fever Queen ran out of smokes and started getting restless and antsy in a frustrated, directionless way that everybody noticed. If Cola's a wavie, then it's no wonder he's dealing with the shiver shakes. The sun's sinking lower and lower, spilling amber fingers over the edge of the Zones. He's not at peak hours anymore.

"He saved my life," says Cola.

You wonder just how many people in the desert can say the very same.

"You owe him?" says Poison, and their tone is skeptical.

"He doesn't think so," says Cola, with a faint sigh.

"But you do."

You can already tell where this is going. Poison's waiting for the ramp-up, for the window to move in and escalate things when they well and truly don't need escalating. You're keeping a primary ear on this conversation, in part because you do not know or have reason to particularly trust Cherri Cola, but also in part because you know and trust Party Poison entirely too well.

"It doesn't matter," Cola's saying. "You don't last as long as he does out here without making some enemies. He needs someone to watch his back."

"You never seen Show Pony in a fight?" Poison counters. You'd roll your eyes if it wouldn't be a complete waste of energy. You uncross your arms, lean up against the car with one elbow so that your free hand is hanging low near your raygun. You can't tell if Cola's picked up on the gesture. You're willing to guess that he has.

"Pony can't watch him twenty-four-seven," he says.

"And you can?" And, yep. There they go. "What, you think D can't handle himself?"

"Worry about yourself," says Cola. "Worry about the Girl."

Which is all in all about the worst thing he could have said.

Poison goes rigid in your periphery. The words were just vague enough to sound like a threat, which is all they need to read it as one. Whether they're doing it intentionally or not doesn't matter.

"You threatening my Girl?" Poison's tone has dropped to a low, dangerous hum, the close of their teeth redolent of a latent menace.

"What?" Cola immediately backpedals. Poor bastard had no idea what the real purpose of this conversation was, which was to draw some plausible provocation out of him. It's equal parts fishing and baiting. It's how Poison learns people's limits. It's how they know what buttons to press and what walls they should be putting up. And Cola's just walked face-first into one. "No, I - "

Poison draws, and you turn to face the pair of them fully for the first time since the discussion began. You've got one hand on your gun, the other ready to reach out and grasp Poison by the shoulder. One look at Cola confirms what you'd already suspected - he's not even armed.

Fortunately, you're saved from having to intervene and play the part of the reasonable voice of dissent (a role you find yourself disinclined to believe suits you) by one Dr. Death Defying as he rolls out from his station.

"Easy, hotshot," he says, the words a slow, bracing pull.

The voice of reason has arrived. The exchange is no longer in danger of exploding into an unfounded altercation, though Poison's suspicion is still palpable when Cola hurries back into the station. Dr. Death calls the situation with Cola "complicated" and doesn't elaborate. He also says that Cherri Cola's one of the reasons that you all managed to get the Girl out in the first place. It's a claim you find dubious, considering this is the first you've heard of him, but D mentioned having eyes and ears on the inside. Might be that this waverider was one of them.

Dr. Death Defying trusts him, at least enough to allow him to stay with him. That's not nothing.

You keep Cherri Cola in your periphery whenever you and him are both in the area. It starts happening more and more often, as Dr. Death's station is the closest thing to a home base that your crew has, after your break-in of Battery City. Cola weathers your scrutiny well enough, even if you're only one of four pairs of suspicious eyes that are on constant alert. Staying with Dr. Death full-time doesn't guarantee that anyone else is going to warm to him, but you watch him as he silently takes Ghoul's pointed remarks and the Kobra Kid's derisive snorts. You watch him slip the dogtags from around his neck and give them to the Girl when she stares, captivated by the way they catch the light. You watch him hold perfectly still when she falls asleep on the couch in Dr. Death's station while he's on it.

You're sitting watch outside the station one morning when Cola comes trekking back from some job or another, dragging a wheeled cooler behind him. It's early in the day - the sun's not even risen - which means that Cola was probably out all night doing whatever it is he was doing.

He's not truly a wavehead, then. He's a former wavehead.

You've never met someone that was capable of walking themselves back from that line.

He eyes you nervously as he passes you. You're about to let him by without comment when you glimpse it - a line of bright pink holstered at Cola's side.

"Nice gun," you say.

Cola startles.

"Wh - you, uh." His hand falls to the gun in a gesture that seems largely automatic. "Oh. It's...it's not mine."

The words stumble out in a rush. You don't think it's anything so absolute as a lie, but his haste to answer a question you didn't ask suggests to you that it's a distortion of the truth. Or something that Cola doesn't want to talk about.

You slide your aviators down your nose and give Cola a look that Kobra and Dr. Death have, in times past, given you. You think you might have perfected their dry delivery, because Cola's throat bobs in a swallow and he looks distinctly uncomfortable.

"It's not," he says again. "I'm borrowing it. It's - I have to take this in."

He moves past and into the station. You let him go, but he's back out again a moment later. Whatever work he needs doing isn't done.

"Water?" you float his way as he starts out across the desert. Cola startles, way the hell too jumpy for someone who should know that you'd still be standing out here.

"Uh. Yeah." He rubs at his arm. In the murky dark, you can barely make out the rash of scabbed-over and peeling skin. "Sort of. I gotta hurry and get it stored before, uh..."

Before the sun comes up, if you had to guess.

You push away from the station wall.

"Need help?"

Cola blinks at that, gives his head a shake a few times like he's assuring himself of the reality of the situation.

"I - yeah. Okay. If you...if you're sure." He seems taken aback that you'd even offer. You can't exactly blame him for that. Poison's unfriendliness had been quick to spread to the rest of the group, with the exception of the Girl. But an extra pair of hands will make the work go quicker.

If he's going to be hanging around Dr. Death full time, it pays to know who he is and why he's there. It's doubtful he's going to bring that up of his own volition, but that doesn't mean he won't.

"D wants us to pack up some Christmas Water for Gertie's kids," says Cola as you keep pace with him. From the changing weather and the slate-gray skies, you'd guessed that it was nearing the wintertime, but you hadn't realized how close it was to the year's end. You track time by its effects on you and those around you, and not by the progression of the days. 

There's a car with the motor still purring thirstily parked a ways off, and Cola climbs in. You settle into the passenger seat beside him, trying to shake the strangeness of an unfamiliar vehicle. You've grown too accustomed to every angle and corner of the Trans Am. The window that got stuck permanently rolled down. The exact roar and pitch of the engine. The smell of diesel. The stickers stuck on the dashboard, the spider sprayed and stenciled on one of the speakers. The BLi air freshener hanging from the rearview mirror.

This car is smaller, and certainly doesn't have the deft handiwork of Fun Ghoul or the Kobra Kid to increase its rate of acceleration and deceleration and make it run better than it was meant to. You'd be more opposed to climbing into the passenger seat belonging to a dust-runner you don't know if you hadn't already gathered the broad strokes of his history. That, and you're armed.

And Dr. D trusts him. That in and of itself says more than anything.

The supply that Cola's meant to transport is only a few miles out from the station, but given that he has to handle it all in insulated coolers, you can see why he felt the need to drive it instead of walking it all the way. He loads the trunk with cooler after cooler of his Christmas Water, flipping open each one to check that its contents are intact. Frozen solid, all of it.

"Tommy left all of it at the drop-off point for us," he says in answer to your unasked question, combing his hair from his eyes with one hand. "Gotta get this squared away before the sun comes up."

"Making good time," you point out. The sun's still not up. 

"Maybe," says Cola.

"Any good with that thing?" You nod at the gun at his hip. Cola freezes and looks at you with unveiled confusion, like he can't quite understand when the conversation took a turn from one subject to the next.

You don't have to justify anything, though. Not out here. You say what you want and you lay it out for the other party to do with as they please. If they don't want to acknowledge it, they won't. But Cola only stares.

"...I haven't...I don't do that anymore," he says.

He's not very good at reading you, not like your crew's gotten to be. If it were any of them, you wouldn't have to breathe a word. That's not the case here.

"Not what I asked."

"I..." Cola wipes at his forehead with the back of his wrist. "I don't know. I was."

That's about all he seems willing to say about it. You shrug and lever the last cooler of ice into the trunk and slam it shut.

"Feel like proving it, let me know," you tell him.

It's not until your next visit to Dr. Death that he takes you up on that. Come the evening, he's got twitches and a runoff of nervous energy that you recognize from when the Kobra Kid can't sit still in the passenger seat or when Poison has nothing to do with their hands. Going cold turkey off the warming rays isn't so different from cutting yourself off the city pills, you're willing to guess. Neither has ever been a problem for you, so you've only got the benefit of an outsider's opinion. That being said, Cola keeps pacing outside the station and the rest of your crew is off negotiating some transaction with Riptide's gang, so it's really just you and him with the Girl and the Pony holding down the place.

You recognize his inability to sit in one spot, the restless flick of his eyes toward the horizon and away again, his hands rubbing at his arms as though he's got chills. You recognize that it's the kind of festering energy that'll eat him alive if he can't find an outlet. So you pull your gun, empty the can of Hypno High that's been keeping you awake for the past few hours, and set it on the hood of Cola's car.

"C'mon," you tell him. He looks at you blankly. You hold up your gun and make a show of cocking it, and he blinks.

"I can't," he whispers.

You toss him a can of caffeine and carbonation. You suck down five cans between the two of you, and by the time you've gone through the entire six-pack, Cola's fingers are a little steadier and he doesn't complain when you line up the cans on the hood of his car and take aim at one of them and clip it off with a sharp snap of light and electromagnetic energy.

You nod at him. _Now you._

Cola raises his gun, his hand trembling, and sears another can off the car in a single shot.

Despite his uncertainty and the unsteadiness of his grip, Cherri Cola just blitzed a can off the hood of his car at two hundred meters. He's sweat-greasy and hazy-eyed and blinking rapidly. He has all the hallmarks of someone who's got too much caffeine and sugar running in through his system and he's liable to snap and crash a little ways down the line. He's a former wavie. He's wracked with shivers and dry coughs and infrequent muscle spasms. He's still recovering from spending too much time baking in the sun's rays and soaking up its radiation. 

It could be a fluke. So you shoot another can, and another. You trade off, just the two of you. You crush the cans into discs and fire them off the car without leaving char-streaks on the rust and paint and see if Cola can do the same, like the Ghoul once did for you. You see how far back you can stand and still clip your targets and not scrape the car's paint-job. The longer you're both at it, the more Cola's breathing evens out. His shots are steady. He misses fewer of his hits. His eyes lose some of their glassy film.

There's no mistaking it: he's a damn good shot with that hot pink gun of his, even if he claims that it's not his.

"Hell of a shot," you tell him, the same thing the Kobra Kid once said to you.

"Fought in the Wars," says Cola. He doesn't look at you. He doesn't say it like the Dust Devil, who made claims that they had family who fought in the War. He says it more like Fever Queen did; quiet and haunted and stained with emotions you can't immediately name. Guilt, maybe. Or regret.

You only witnessed the Wars from a distance. Looking at the tags around his neck and looking at the lines and scars that have been carved into his features, you can believe it.

"But you lived."

One side of Cola's mouth quirks up into a sad, fragile little smile that dissolves in the same instant it forms.

"In theory," he says.

He doesn't elaborate, and you don't ask him to. You and him keep shooting cans off cars until the sun starts to leak its milky, predawn dyes into the curve of the skyline. You reach out, slow and easy so that Cola has plenty of time to move away. He doesn't. So you clap him once on the shoulder, squeeze tight, and shoot him one of your small smiles before you head back in.

You're in good health - relatively - and you've never once been on the Bat City pills. Cherri Cola has been addled with the fevers and chills of withdrawal, his nerves looking shot to hell, and even with all that, he's capable of matching you in verve and accuracy. It's impossible to guess at his age or the ages of anyone else in the Zones, but if he fought in the Analog Wars then that means he's been fighting for longer than you have. He's fighting on more fronts than you, too, particularly now. He's still scaling the inclines of his own vices and trying to shake them loose.

This, in combination with everything else you learn about him that day, tells you everything you need to know about why Dr. Death Defying trusts him.

If Dr. Death trusts him, then you suppose that you can put your faith in him too.

****

**\--**

**we are galaxies  
a caterpillar that got stuck**

**\--**

"This is a bad idea," says Cola.

You can't fault him for that. Hyper-Thrust's is a wavehead bar stationed all the way the hell out in Zone Six. It makes the perfect cover for the deal that Poison needs carried out here on the behest of Dr. D himself, but given Cola's past, he is, understandably, more than a little wary about the crowd. The problem had been that Ghoul and Kobra are off flashing the Trans Am at some carbon-raising event for Gravel Gertie - some kind of race or derby that the Girl had been all too eager to watch - but Poison needed this deal done tonight, so Dr. Death said they could borrow Cola's car if he could be talked into it. Cherri Cola could only be talked into allowing use of his car if he was going to be the only one driving it.

So here he is, despite his misgivings.

"Stay easy, motherfucker," says Poison, hand on Cola's shoulder. They've transitioned to approaching him with a brazen overfamiliarity that you now recognize to be another brand of Party Poison styled assessment. You were able to vouch for Cherri Cola, so now they're off treating him like he's one of the gang and seeing how he takes to it. You hadn't had to suffer through the intricacies of this ritual of theirs, though presumably that has more to do with the fact that it was Poison's idea to trust you and they're only offering the same courtesy to Cola for Dr. D's sake, so they'd like some modicum of control over the situation.

"I'm gonna get recognized," mutters Cola.

"Stick with us, and we'll all be milkshake." Poison shakes the hair from their eyes. It's newly dyed and neon crimson, particularly underneath the joint's dim lighting. It makes them look all the more distinctive. Sure enough, you notice several burn-stained patrons look at the three of you sidelong and then shift away. A few slip out the doors entirely. "Look, see, there's Vertigo Jack. We know him."

You follow their gaze to a vaguely familiar Zone-rat with fair hair, turned orange beneath the lights. He nods to the three of you once, but makes no motion to approach or otherwise greet you.

As far as jobs go, you've seen more auspicious beginnings.

"We're lookin' for a bunch'a Hot Chimp's bitch-bots," says Poison, undeterred. "They're our contacts. Anyone asks, we're dancin' the night away with 'em, all right?"

You're not entirely certain that you won't end up doing that anyway, if Poison gets their way. The fact that Hot Chimp and Dr. Death are acquainted with one another was not, in retrospect, too surprising. They're DJs. They all fulfill similar roles in the desert.

"I think they know it's me." Cola jerks his chin at a couple of wavies the corner, eyeing him up like he's stiff ripe for looting.

"Nah," says Poison, drawing out the word. "I have your back. And your front, dear sir."

They wink at him.

Cola stares at them with an open-mouthed helplessness. You suppress a sigh. Poison breezes on ahead of the pair of you, leaving Cola to utter a couple of floundering vowel sounds before he finally manages to form words. 

"Are they...?"

"No," you say. 

"They just..."

"I know," you say.

"They're _really..."_

"Yeah," you say. "They do that."

They know full well the effect they can have. Near as you can tell, they have next to no interest in anything that comes after. They simply like fucking with people when the mood arises.

The companion droids are unmistakable. You've seen them here and there in the desert, but you know they're most common in the City slums. They're recognizable for how hard BL/ind draws the lines for their presentation upon manufacture. You look at them and you can tell straight away how BL/ind wants you to read them, based on the shapes of their chassis. All three of them are titanium-bright, their silvery skin reflecting red underneath the low-level lighting. Two are bald. The third wears a wig of deep green.

"Lookin' for some brand new shields," says Poison, offhand, as they sidle up to the trio. That must be the encoded word that the droids are looking for, because they exchange glances.

"Party Poison?" says one, expression neutral.

"You know it." Poison grins. "On the behalf of Dr. D himself."

Another of the droids is eyeing you. The parts of them skinned in chrome are scuffed and scraped, as though they've been out here a while. There are areas where the plating has been peeled back, laying bare the tangles of multicolored wires beneath.

You've seen service units up close before, in your satellite chasing days, but they were always long-dead. This is the first time you've met with one that's alive, and even if handling a crisped satellite isn't so different from digging through the belongings of a dried-out corpse, it's a new feeling to have those artificial eyes on you.

"You guys been out here long?" says Cola. He seems much more willing to engage in conversation, probably because it means he'll be less likely to be dragged out of the establishment if he does. 

"Midori has," says one, nodding at the droid in green.

"Two years." Midori's tone is rusted and sharp, like nails dragged over stone. "But it gets hard to find plus out here."

"Cherri Cola." Cola takes the droid's hand and clasps it. "Starshine."

"Midori," says the droid. "I think the word you use is...earthshine, yes?"

"That's the one," says Cola. "What about your friends?"

"Cee-Tee," says the other droid. That's a definitely numerical designation, shortened into something resembling a name. "Double-O is the one talking to your friend. We are newer to the Zones."

You catch the glint of carbons changing hands as Double-O passes over some rebreathing filters and tubes.

"You work for Hot Chimp?"

"She is the only one who will take runners like us," says Midori. She manages to convey rueful dejection through the shake of her head and the shift her jointed jaw. "All of the others - they say it is too expensive to keep androids running."

That doesn't surprise you. Units like them need an ongoing supply of plus to keep functioning, and their batteries don't last very long, either. You know from the satellites you used to handle that most droids are built to degrade rapidly. BLi doesn't need to recycle them if it can just retool them to monitor the Zones from on high.

"They say we aren't runners." Cee-Tee's voice is smoother than Midori's. They haven't run as far down as she has. "We're just machines to them. Tin cans and scrap parts. Pornodroids. Some will kill us to see what pieces they can sell."

"I'm sorry," says Cola, and he really does sound sorry. The word's a little pinched around the edges, like he's choking something back. "That sounds...horrible."

"We might be the last models to get out, too. They're going to start making us so that we can't leave the City, or we lose power."

"It won't be that way always," Midori whispers. "One day..."

She falls silent.

"He will turn Battery City to ashes," you finish for her. Her surprise, when she looks at you, is palpable.

"Yes," Midori breathes. "Destroya. He will..."

"All right." Poison shuffles up between the two of you without a care for what kind of discussion they might be interrupting, as always. "Deal's square. What say we have a little fun before the night's up, yeah?"

As you suspected, what Poison also wanted from this job was something to occupy their time.

The three of you spend the full night in Hyper-Thrust's until the sun starts to creep up the horizon. You can tell that all three of the droids expect that one or more of you might take them aside to one of the back rooms eventually. But Party Poison, as you could have guessed, as they suggested they would, dances the night away instead. No matter what their synthetic company might anticipate, Poison isn't terribly keen on taking _anyone_ aside to a back room. What they really want is someone who will keep up with their nigh-limitless energy until they've had their fill of adrenaline for the night. They get drunk, climb on tables, demand the newest shit from Mad Gear to be piped out from the speakers. It's because they're the infamous Party Poison that this behavior doesn't get them kicked from Hyper-Thrust's. Cherri Cola doesn't get drunk, but that doesn't stop him from joining in eventually.

It's easier to relax once he commits to it. There are a few surefire ways to land in Poison's good graces, and keeping pace with their spontaneity is one of them.

"Do you know what it means?" Midori whispers to you as you watch the four of them clearing some of the tables to make an impromptu dance floor. "The Graffiti Bible. Old units would speak its words aloud in the Lobby, but I only ever saw pieces. Pages."

You shake your head.

"Only saw it once." Like her, you heard those passages a lot more often than you read them yourself.

"They say Destroya's child will raze the City," says Midori. There's a question in the sentiment as she says it aloud, looking at you.

"Dunno who wrote it," is all you can say. "Dunno what they knew."

Whoever put those words to paper and committed them to thousands of digital souls sealed inside the City walls, they did more than spawn a superstition. They founded an entire belief, and a part of you wants to trust that Destroya itself seeded that thought somewhere, and allowed it to flourish.

But more likely, you'll never truly know.

Come the morning, it's about time to depart. Poison is wasted, Cola is winding down, and you all got what you came for anyway.

Midori catches your wrist with one hand as you head out. Her grip is smooth and printless - just like yours.

"Thank you," she says.

You're not clear on what for. Something of this confusion must translate to your expression, because then she laughs.

"For treating us as one of you," she says. "Not everyone does."

You wish you had the spare carbons to offer to her - some payment for her time, even if none of you partook in the conventional services these models are meant to offer. Something that might help her and Double-O and Cee-Tee purchase some plus from the next BLi vending machine they run across. But you don't, and you can't. Not with a growing Girl to feed. Not when you're living day to day, moment by moment like you always have.

"I do not know that we'll ever see each other again," Midori continues quietly. "So I wanted to say: thank you."

You offer her the first courtesy that comes to mind.

"Keep running," you tell her gently, and she smiles at you.

She's right.

You don't see her again.

****

**\--**

**mr. moth come quick with any luck  
long walk in a dark house**

**\--**

There are weeks when you have to hide because Korse is on a warpath. Those weeks are, arguably, the worst, because you're killjoys and all killjoys have a certain level of wanderlust buried in their souls. You got used to always running years ago. You were practically born into it. The pace and rate of acceleration is the only thing that's changed about how far and fast you have to go today. You relocate more and more often. The Girl doesn't complain, even if it must be hard for her. She loads your guns and helps keep you and Ghoul in the car when you have to duck out of the backseat windows and open fire on the entourage of dracs at your tail, and she doesn't complain. There simply isn't time for it.

It's difficult to force yourselves to go to ground and sit tight in one location, but it becomes necessary when Korse grows all the more determined to bring you down. It's at times like those that you have to hide the car and find some isolated hideout and knuckle down around the radio until Dr. Death Defying gives you the all-clear or the dracs find you or both. You stay three weeks in an old whiskey purification center, and nearly six in a defunct gas station diner.

You're not ones for sitting tight and waiting. The Girl gets restless, no matter how you try to pass the time for her. Kobra teaches her how to work his power glove and what a live circuit looks like. You teach her what each of the letters on your bad luck beads mean. Poison paces, combing hands through their hair. The Ghoul chews on his nails and reads the same magazines cover to cover with a feverish repetition.

Whenever you return to the highways you call home, it's a relief and you all celebrate with achingly loud music blared out of car windows and whoops into the late night.

Little by little, the desert is rallying around you. Gravel Gertie thanks Ghoul and the Kid for the fundraising they did on her behalf, and sends you a hefty stack of highway flares via the Show Pony express. You nearly get cornered on Resurrection Road, but a wayfaring group of crash queens blaze in on the firefight before it goes too far Costa Rica. They tell you with toothy smiles that it's an _honor_ to say they helped the Fabulous Killjoys. You pass them some of your dog food dinner and clean water, even if you can't really spare it.

Two weeks later you have to carry those crash kids' masks to the Witch when their offer of help nets them Korse's attention. That's getting more and more common too. You only remember Vertigo Jack vaguely, but you recognize him when he's had x's carved into the places where his eyes used to be and the symbol of a pill cut into his tongue. Poison takes his mask to the Phoenix Witch and leaves it at one of Her mailboxes the next time the Girl wants to send a letter to her mom.

Dust-rats spray your symbols on buildings and deface your extermination posters, and then get ghosted for the trouble. You nearly get an eyeful of glass when a drac busts a bottle over your head because you were busy making sure that your _manos_ didn't get dusted to worry about your nine o' clock. Kobra proves that he's not just lethal in close quarters but utterly devastating when he can get his power glove around a draculoid's neck.

But no matter how hard you fight, it's getting harder and harder to last for any particular length of time before it all catches up to you. You don't cross through Zone One much anymore unless it's for a very specific purpose. Obtaining water is one such purpose. It's a mission that invariably loses focus when Poison recognizes the quartet of motorcycles poised to make some sort of run for the city.

"They got Storm," says Nitro. She's still on her bike, her gaze fixed straight ahead. "Bastards masked him."

That would explain why there are only four of them. Your heart squeezes in your chest with a dim throb of something approaching grief. You've grown too accustomed to the loss of Zone-rats like Storm Brio. You resolve to petition the Witch for his safe journey when the time next allows.

"You make this run, you're not coming back," says Kobra.

"You did." You recognize the burner in green who pipes up from the back. He's Benzo Mori, the one of Riptide's you've had the least contact with by choice. He's temperamental in a way that rivals even Poison or Ghoul, prone to picking fights for the hell of it. Even now.

"And BLi'll know you're coming too." Kobra doesn't seem to want to look any of them in the eyes as he says it. "None of us can pull a stunt like that again."

As you might have predicted, Benzo chooses to escalate things by prowling right on up to him, purposefully invading his personal space.

"You think you can stop me, Kid?"

You stop him in his tracks by drawing level with Kobra and looking at Benzo dead on, eye to eye, and you do not blink. Generally, that's sufficient in getting people to back the hell off.

"Save your heat for the pigs, Benzo Mori," says Riptide. To Poison, they add, "don't try and stop us."

Benzo doesn't relent, even with you staring him down. You brace your knuckles to your palm, like you once watched Titan do - it must be years ago now - and crack them while the Ghoul crosses his arms just beside you.

Poison doesn't try and stop them. All of you can recognize this effort for what it is, and you don't think that any of these runners plan on coming back. But Poison hands Riptide some battery packs regardless - battery packs that none of you can truly spare. None of you protest the gesture. That night, you whisper each of their names, one by one, and kiss your bad luck beads five times over. You don't have any pieces of their souls to deliver to the Witch directly. You have no room in your shadow for anyone else's ghosts. You have watched so many others as they've been vaporized and massacred and just generally slaughtered that this is the most you can offer. It's not much, in the end. It's words and intent. You don't expect that it will decide anything about the fates of Riptide's crew or where they end up.

You also don't expect Cherri Cola to lose his shit when the news makes it back to Dr. Death's station.

"They didn't try and get him back?" he asks, and everyone stares at him.

_You_ stare at him.

You don't like what that implies.

Ghoul says outright what's on everyone's mind. "You joking, zoneboy? Masked. You know. Once you're a drac, that's point of no return."

"It's not," says Cola, "the point of no return. They're masks. They trap the soul. They don't tether it."

"Cola." Dr. Death stretches his name into a warning.

At some point, your hands became fists at your sides.

"You weren't there! You haven't seen how they are, up close." Cola's hand has gone up to his dogtags again. He's twisting the chain fervently between his fingers so that the metal digs into the scabbed and discolored skin. The tendons in his neck stand out. His eyes are wide and entirely too bright. "I have. I know how they think. They're still _in_ there."

"You know how they _think?"_ Something about that seems to strike a nerve with the Kobra Kid. You can't blame him for that. It's struck something in you as well. "The hell's that supposed to mean?"

The Ghoul remains unconvinced. "They're dracs. Point is that they _don't_ think."

You've been killing dracs your entire life. If there was ever any possibility that they were ordinary people -

"Haven't you ever tried pulling the mask _off?"_ says Cola desperately. "They're still under there. Trapped."

No. You _haven't_ tried it. You haven't ever tried pulling the mask off. It's easy to dismiss it and say that the situation has never afforded it, but now that you think about it - _has_ that always been the case?

Or was it simply easier to not think about it?

"And _I_ said, _the hell's that supposed to mean?"_ says Kobra. He's starting to boil over; whatever nerve this conversation has touched has just gotten scraped raw.

You could always write them off as things long-dead. Stripped of their souls, stripped of life.

_They're mindless drones,_ says Doublestar. _They don't think._

"They're people," says Cola. 

_They had masks yanked over their heads,_ says Doublestar, _and their souls sucked clean out of their skulls._

One of the four levels of dead.

You stare at the floor without seeing it.

"They're still people," says Cola. His hands go up through his hair, fiddle with his shirt, flutter with a nervous energy that's always been characteristic of him but's worsening now. 

_The only thing you can do for them is kill them before they kill you,_ says Doublestar.

"Their souls don't get lost there until they _die_ like that," says Cola. "They're not gone. Not until they're dead."

How many dracs have you dusted? How many of them have you shot, killed, ghosted, murdered? How many of them were vaporized out of obligation? How many of those deaths were unavoidable?

You fold your arms across your chest. You force yourself to breathe. Cola is working himself up and everyone continues to stare at him, so you breach the tension in the only way you know how.

"How do you know?" you ask him.

You raise your head and you look at him. He tries to look back at you, but his gaze quickly skirts away. He can't seem to hold still. His fingertips dig into the burn scars stretched into his skin. He looks like someone trying to claw themselves to pieces right in front of you.

"I used to - after the Wars," he says, the words halting, his fingers winding tight around the chain of his tags. "I hunted them. The city line. I was..."

The words choke, and he falls silent.

He says he _hunted_ them. As if for sport, or as a pastime. You've ghosted plenty of dracs, but you've never made a point of going out of your way for that express purpose. You don't think that any of you have. Why would you? Killing dracs is another part of _staying alive_ in the Zones.

"Cola," says Dr. Death, cutting him off. "Come on, sunshine. It don't matter anymore. Those crash queens went down swingin' last week. 'S what they wanted."

Cola staggers back into the station where the Girl is napping, hopefully fully unaware of this entire discussion, and Dr. Death Defying looks at the four of you sternly.

"Don't go chasing down that boy's demons, all right?" he says. "He'll say what he needs to when he's good 'n ready to. Not before."

The idea that dracs might still have souls tethered there underneath their masks strikes you as something that should have been brought up sooner rather than later. All the same, you know better than to press the point when Dr. D speaks with that tone.

By the time you head back into the station yourself, the Girl is awake and Cola isn't. She looks to be taking full advantage of that fact. She grins at you when you look at her.

"He don't like his skin," she says, pointing at the rashes and scabs that have been freshly peeled back from the bare skin of Cola's forearms. She talks like one of you. Ghoul's the one who speaks up the most, so her speech patterns emulate his more than anyone's.

"Guess not," you allow. 

"So 'm givin' it more color," says the Girl proudly. "So he don't have t'be sad about it." She uncaps another marker and starts to draw purple spirals across the back of one of his hands. Cola doesn't so much as stir. He's out like a light. You sit down on the couch next to the Girl and watch her work.

When she holds out a green marker to you, you join her efforts to help Cola hate himself a little less.

****

**\--**

**a roman candle heart  
keep us far apart**

**\--**

You were only meant to stay parked for a minute. Pit stop for the Ghoul to check the engines, because according to him they were getting real thirsty. None of you expected much in the way of retaliation all the way out in Zone Six, the furthest possible distance from Battery City, but you also know that Korse is on the move again. Not so long ago, he dusted some twelve or so young Zone-rats and strung them up for the desert to find. It was a clear warning, a clear _threat,_ so Poison's latest goal has been to get as far away from the source of it as possible.

You've been scanning the horizon while Ghoul feeds up the engines, the same position you always take, when a dark blot materializes in the distance. It doesn't take long for you to surmise the source of it.

"Pigs!" you call. Poison doesn't wait to confirm it. They immediately turn toward the Trans Am.

"Ghoul!"

"She ain't ready yet!" snaps Ghoul. "We go now, she'll overheat on us. Leave us dead in the fuckin' water!"

They take it in stride, like they always do. Immediately, they wave the Girl over and slide their mask on in the same fluid movement. At once, she abandons whatever small game she's been playing in the dirt with her robot to trot up beside them.

"Behind me, Girlie," says Poison. "Look alive, killjoys. Let's make some fucking noise."

The longer you watch, the more silhouettes begin to sharpen. At least two cars. Something like four motorcycles. It's a full-on raiding party. Probably one on the hunt for all of _you._

Poison looks to you silently. You nod and pull on your helmet and take position.

Even with your deft hand and keen eye, you can only pick off so many of the dracs from a distance. They close in on you fast. The Kobra Kid explodes from a crouch behind some of the sparse scrub brush and takes one of the dracs down off its bike before it can pull in. The Ghoul laughs once, loud and rapturous. You hear Poison saying, "behind me, _behind me!"_

And then the clap is on top of you, and there's no time for anything else. The air's thick with multicolored blasts of light, white cut through with red and green and blue. The canvas of a firefight hums at the back of your head and mingles with the smell of ozone and charred meat. A drac hits you from behind, takes your legs out from under you, and kicks your raygun from your hand. Then several of them descend on you. You try to crawl away, but their hands are grasping and relentless and you can't get a purchase on the sand.

Then Ghoul kicks in one of their throats and grabs at another bare-handed. He's managed to lose his raygun. The dracs turn their attention on him and you seize the opportunity to elbow-crawl to his gun, a green and white streak in the dirt. You toss it the Ghoul, who catches it smoothly, discharges it into a drac's ear once before the battery chimes dead. You fish out a spare from your jacket in time for the last drac to tackle Ghoul to the ground. He falls next to you but retains a hold on his weapon. You hold out the battery and he slams the gun down over it, locking and loading it in one smooth motion, and leaves the side of the last drac's head smoking.

The two of you grasp at each other's shoulders, balancing each other's weight as you both get back to your feet. The landscape of the clap has changed; the Girl's nowhere to be seen, and while you can see Kobra cracking a drac's neck a little ways off, Poison's absent too.

You and Ghoul trade a look. In less than half a second, you've split off in opposite directions in search of them both.

This firefight has barely started, and it's already going poorly. You don't work well when separated. You work best as a unit; it is under those circumstances that you can most efficiently distribute the maximum amount of destruction to all parties hungering for it. 

The roar of motors just past a copse of Joshuas calls your attention. There's a pair of dracs circling the Girl like vultures. She's scrunched up in one place, hugging her toy robot close to her chest, like it might protect her from their scrutiny. You raise your gun - 

And Party Poison is already tearing over the crest of the opposite hill, their raygun flashing neon and fire. They slam the tip of their zap to the back of a drac's head and light it up like a fucking road flare.

You slide down the rest of the way to join them. The other two are on your heels in less than a minute.

"Circle back," says Poison. They've got one hand gripping the Girl's tightly. "We gotta clear 'em before they find the car."

"Too late," says Ghoul, grimly.

Now there's four of them moving toward the five of you, and they're moving too slowly, too deliberately. The fact that they're not rushing you with fire in the sky is enough to stop you dead. It's the lean, unmistakable silhouette of a scarecrow flanked by three draculoids that tightens your grip on your gun and you start forward, but Poison holds up a hand and you halt.

The four of you automatically unfurl into a straight line.

It's not like being jumped and ambushed and chased and herded like Korse has done continuously since he was assigned to the four of you. It's practically a display of civility - a strange ritualistic ceasefire while the last of Korse's dracs and the scarecrow himself get into position.

The air has a tangible charge to it.

"Behind us," Kobra says to the Girl quietly. "Anything happens, you run. Okay? You run."

The Girl nods once. She doesn't even look scared. The four of you - you're her heroes. She's seen you take hit after hit and get back up again. She's seen you do incredible things. You look at her as she picks up her radio and scrambles up one of the hills to watch, and you realize that you must seem untouchable to her, the same way Doublestar had been to you, right up until the moment when she wasn't.

The pressure of words you've never said aloud is like a garrote around your throat. Korse and his entourage are getting closer. The dracs square off with the four of you, one to one, in a straight line to match yours. The possibility that you might die here has always been present, and it is, on the whole, something you have not particularly _minded_ happening. You have never _minded_ destroying yourself so that the Girl can live, so that your crew can keep running, but the possibility that you will leave some hole in their souls had never, up until this point, occurred to you. It should have. It really should have. You have nine dead shadows stacked into yours and you carry their names and their faces like weights around your neck. Once you join them, what will become of the ones you leave behind?

You can't fight to keep them alive if you're ghosted.

You should have planned for this. You've been running for your own death since the day you learned how and you never once planned for any of what comes after. There are a million things that could happen to you, that _have_ happened to you, and none of them have left scars the way losing your crews have. You have been shot and cut into and had your ribs crushed. You have had the shit kicked out of you and you have been strangled and you have wasted away beneath the sun. You've been left to die under the acid rain because it was incomprehensible to BL/ind that you would survive the collision of one of their cars into yours. You have, by this point, lost track of the details of everything that has happened to you. It should be unfathomable that of all the horrific, soul-fucking shit that's been done to you, none of these things _bother_ you, none of them _scare_ you, because they are little more than things that you would on the whole _prefer_ not to happen to you, and that preference has little to no bearing on what actually happens.

The Girl looks at the four of you and you don't think it occurs to her that you could lose. That you could die here. That she would have to watch it happen.

You do not want to be - you _can't_ be - her Doublestar.

Korse and his dracs are some five feet away from the rest of you, facing you in a line. By unspoken courtesy, no one has fired or made any movement since. You're at one end of the lineup. Korse is level with the Kobra Kid, eyeing him with a strange and savage disdain. Kobra's helmet with its _GOOD LUCK_ visor glares expressionlessly back.

Ghoul has taken the opportunity to yank his purple-and-green mask up off his head and light up a cigarette. Almost as an afterthought, he pauses and then promptly makes is if to offer one to the drac across from him. It stares dully back and he shrugs, as if to say, _your loss._

You hope that when you die, you die laughing. The Ghoul almost makes it so. You're grateful that your helmet hides your smirk.

Then Korse smiles, a thin drape of ice over the utter emptiness beneath, and raises his gun so that it's pointing at the sky, at the ready.

_Fair and square,_ you think is what this all means. _We beat you, or you beat us._

As if he could hope to shoot down the Fabulous Four.

You can feel the Girl's eyes on all of you when Korse twitches and you all _draw_ -

Then the air goes bright and crackling with laser fire. You catch a drac in the chest. Its shot sears your side. You flinch but you don't go down. More laserbolts go streaking out past you in flurrying light and heat and the kaleidoscope of chaos. You almost go down but you don't. You _don't._ You force yourself back upright but now there's an unnatural whiteness two inches from your face because a drac is forcing you to your knees. Your vision cuts out into fuzz and static. Your head cracks to the ground with enough force to knock away your helmet. It goes rolling aside.

You catch words spit out, ground into the dirt:

_"Keep running."_

You don't think you were out for very long. There's a burn in the back of your throat. You can taste your own blood. A gasp, the scuff of feet over sand. You know that sound. You _know_ it.

You get up. Your legs burn with the effort. You've been hit, and you know you've been hit, but that doesn't matter. All that matters, all that has _ever_ mattered, is _her_.

You get up. You catch the sound of her scream, her small hand outstretched for you, for _you,_ her eyes wide and wild and so _terrified_ \- and you can't find your gun but that doesn't matter. You surge forward.

Korse catches you with a clenched fist to your gut. You fold over, wheezing. You can't breathe. The scarecrow grabs you by the front of your shirt, drags you up. You fight it. Of course you fight it. You know what it means to be pinioned by a scarecrow and you're not going to let that happen again. Not _again._ You fight it but the most you manage is to rip yourself free for half a second before the crow's hands close around your upper arm and _twist_ and you go down grunting. He drags you through the sand like you weigh nothing to him. He hauls you up and holds you like you're little more than a wet rag. You're taller than most, but Korse looms over you like he has a full head on you.

You can see every line in his face. His features are stiff and stony, as though carved from bone. His skin is too pale. His expression isn't cold, isn't angry, isn't gleeful. It's utterly bereft. It's blank and for some reason it's that emptiness that makes your heart clench painfully in your ribs, because _that_, more than anything else, has you bracing yourself for whatever horror comes next.

"Positive Identification: Hostile One-Thirty-Six. Designation: Jet Star." 

It takes you a moment to register that Korse is talking. It's the first time you've heard a scarecrow say anything at all. Korse says the words aloud, flat and devoid of much in the way of emotion. He doesn't seem to be talking to you. It's like he's issuing vague commentary to some invisible spectator.

Again, you try to wrench free of his grip. This time his hand closes around your throat.

"No known alias." He's still not talking to you. He says it slowly, deliberately, as he stares at you, takes you in. His eyes rove over every inch of your face. He appraises your equipment. Your jacket. Your printless fingers. But he lingers on your face.

It would be nice to be able to spit at him, to swear at him, to do anything at all. 

You can't. You're breathing too hard and too rapidly.

"Member of the terrorist group known as the Fabulous Killjoys. Apprehend with caution."

One hand moves up to tip your chin up and you can't.

"To be exterminated at all costs."

His thumb grazes the ridge of your cheekbone and you _can't._

"Susceptible to close range attack."

The realization of what this is would send an icy thrill through you, but so much of you is numbed already that there's no part of you left to react.

He's listing _statistics._

"Highly lethal at long range."

He's listing _data._

He's listing bullet points that must be on file for you, back in Battery City.

"Highly lethal," Korse repeats quietly, "at long range."

His thumb settles atop your closed eyelid.

You kick out. You fight it. You try to claw at his face, strike at his throat, shove him _off_ of you. His grip is ironclad and he doesn't so much as flinch.

You know what's coming. You _know what's coming_ and you know now that the reason he's listing it aloud is because he _wants you to know it._

"Lethality at long range," says Korse, "requires depth perception."

You do not scream.

You do not scream until you do and when you do it feels like your vocal cords are being rent apart. There is nothing, _nothing_ in the world comparable to this - for the sensation of a thumb pressing down into your socket and _continuing_ to press down until the pain becomes absolute and you can feel yourself bucking, thrashing underneath his grip. You are too cold and you are too hot and you can't _think_ because everything keeps shorting out into a blistering white. Your thoughts twist and writhe in your skull like live, dying things. You start to convert them into pure will, into the absolute concentrated psychic energy for Korse to keep pressing down until he damages something vital inside of you and crushes a nerve and occludes a vessel and ends up killing you.

You scream like someone who's been set on fire. You can hear yourself screaming your throat raw and Korse does not _stop_ until the right side of your face is wet and streaming red. You can't see. You can't _see._ _Kill me. Kill me. Kill me._ There's blood in your remaining eye. The place where Korse's fingers dig into your skin are incandescent. You've bitten through part of your tongue. You _can't see_, and - 

And Korse drops you into the dirt.

You want to lie there until the Witch comes for you. Until She finally, finally takes pity on you and plucks you up from the dust and carries you off to the other souls you've failed.

She doesn't, though.

You have to get up.

You have to get up, so you get the fuck back up.

You get the fuck back up on your hands and knees. You have to cup one palm over the freshly oozing hollow that's been made of your right eye. Most of that side of your face is coated in congealing red. You can feel it sticky and drying against your skin, even if the socket feels like it's still leaking, and you thought you'd experienced every possible type of pain there was but you can give Korse this: he's proved you wrong. Your head spins. You don't have time to process the amount of pain you're in. You have to keep moving and you have to do it _now_ before the Girl is lost to you forever because you promised to her that it would be okay and this wasn't supposed to happen, not again. This was _never_ supposed to happen again. You weren't supposed to lose people. You were going to be the only acceptable casualty.

That's not on the table anymore.

They didn't ghost her. They wouldn't. They want her back too badly for that. And now they have her, and - 

And they left you alive.

They left _you_ alive. Why? The orders are to kill, not to capture, and you know this because you've been scanning the articles in the papers that have made their way out to the Zones for months now, for _months._ All four of you are wanted dead.

Did Korse leave you, _just_ you - ?

You could be the only one left.

The thought steals your breath for a second. Just for a second. No. _No._ Maybe. Maybe that's the case. You can't know. You can't know for certain. You have to find the rest of them and determine it for yourself. You have to, as soon as you manage to get the fuck back _up_ and start walking properly.

Every time you try to stand, your world tips sickeningly on its axis and you end up on the ground again. More than once, you retch, spit the burning tang of blood and bile into the sand as your vision goes spotty, but that doesn't stop you. _Death can't fucking stop you,_ said Poison, once, clapping your back. You swear you can feel the ghost of pressure on your shoulder from their hand - _years ago, now._ So if you can't walk you will fucking crawl, because you're not going to lie down and die out here. Not out here. Not with no notion of what happened to your crew and _not_ with the Girl missing, taken back to the ivory walls of Battery City and the fortress of the BL/ind.

You don't know how long it's been before you glimpse movement on the horizon. You blink, trying to clear the static from your vision. It's not a mirage. The violently red head of hair bobs closer and closer until they're crouching in front of you. You feel yourself flinch at their touch when their hand grazes at your new blind side, but their touch is real. They're real.

"Jet," whispers Poison. The word sounds like it's about to break. They look like someone who's lacquered their own will over their open, oozing wounds.

You can recognize it because you're doing the same.

You're not the only one left.

"Korse," you answer softly. As if there was any doubt of who did this to you.

Their grip tightens. You can tell by the awkward distribution of their weight that they're injured when they say, "c'mon."

They try to help you upright regardless, but then they're leaning into you and you let them. Their weight rocks into your side and you let them drag one of your arms around the slope of their shoulders. You tug their arm gently over yours so you're more or less resting against each other. It's easier to walk with their direction. You keep squinting with your remaining eye, as though that might bring your surroundings into sharper relief.

Progress is limping and slow. You don't know how bad Poison's been hurt, but you can guess from the awkward rhythm of their gait that it's bad.

Korse could have finished you both off. You're certain of it.

So why didn't he?

You're not the only one he fucked up and left gasping in the sand. Fun Ghoul has a long, reddened laceration cut into the side of his mouth. The Kobra Kid's right hand is smoking slightly, charred and black. You watch it shake and jerk with nervous tremors that twitch the fingertips and leave him grimacing.

He left you _all_ alive.

"Fuck, Jet," says Ghoul. The horrified sympathy on his features is painful to witness - as if you have it any worse than him. The new line carved into his face seems an almost deliberate attempt to mimic his symbol.

"They took her," is your only answer, because that's the only part of this that matters, that truly matters. You've had your eye gouged out and you've been shot, again. You can live through that. You always _do._ But what about her?

"Fuck," whispers Kobra. He tries to put his face in his hands, but his injured one is shaking too badly.

Too much of this feels premeditated. Methodical.

Korse went after the four of you directly. He didn't do it sidelong and he didn't do it in a way that would allow you any of you to fight tough and dirty. In doing so, he stripped Party Poison of their ability to strategize around his tactics. It was a taunt. No. It wasn't _just_ a taunt. He expected that they would reciprocate. He issued a challenge that you come up against him one to one and he must have expected that they would have accepted that challenge.

Your remaining eye flicks to each one of them. To Fun Ghoul, who's had his face laid open, turned into a mockery of his own caricature. To the Kobra Kid, who's had his capacity for straightforward, brute force attack hampered.

He called you highly lethal at long range.

And then he tore out your eye.

You shut it, feeling sick.

Every part of this was planned.

Every part of this.

You're certain of it.

He has spent years now after the four of you. He has dedicated years of his life to this. He has had ample time to analyze each of you. To gauge how best to approach you for the most desired outcome.

The only detail that gets you is that he could have killed you, and he didn't.

But even that's obvious. Once you give it longer than a second of thought, it's horribly obvious.

He expects you to go after him.

And even worse, you know that you're going to. You know that you're going to play right into his hands, just for the chance to get her back.

But what choice do you have?

****

**\--**

**this is all too reminiscent of things past  
every bridge starts to look the same**

**\--**

There's a bitter serenity in knowing that your fate was sealed far before now. It was an accepted outcome when you all agreed to break into Bat City and raise the Girl in the dust and heat and exhaust fumes of the Zones. You knew that BL/ind would not relent, that it would not stop until all four of you were dead for the insult you did them in breaching their walls and stealing away a prized asset. It was inevitable.

And now they've got a notion that they can solve two problems at once. They have the Girl. They _have_ her. They have her and they know that you'll come for her. They know how you did it the first time so they'll know to expect you and they'll know what to do when you come for her.

Again, you all know there's no real choice in this. There's no question that you'll go after her. You'll get her back, no matter what it takes.

You've been hit hard, though. It might be the hardest you've ever been kicked down, any one of you.

Poison asks you if you can sew Ghoul back up. You have to give up the ghost before even so much as threading the needle, because your hands are shaking too much and despite all your squinting to compensate for your missing eye, Korse was right. Your depth perception has suffered.

He knew the best possible way to inhibit you. Your keen eye and your steady hands, the things that saved your life and the lives of your crew innumerable times over, have been stripped away.

Poison has to do the stitching of Ghoul's mouth in the backseat to the accompaniment of much muttered swearing and hisses of pain. Kobra drives back to Dr. Death's station one-handed, his injured arm drawn up to his chest and his expression pinched and pained.

Dr. Death only needs to take one look at you, the agony of grief laid bare on each of your faces, before he understands full well what's happening, and what comes next.

"We need a smokescreen, D," says Poison. "Can you do that?"

He holds Poison's gaze unwaveringly as he nods.

You catch snippets of the broadcast while you work - loading up the Trans Am with every spare battery back and extra flashbang you can find. It's a strange, eerie feeling to hear someone prophesying your own death. It was you and the Kobra Kid, see. You got into a clap with an exterminator and got yourselves dusted all along Route Guano. You were the two with the most egregious injuries, so you were the two most likely to not have made it back to refuel. It might not fool BL/ind, but it'll wake the Zones up a mite, mere hours before you find yourselves dusted at the city line for real. At least, that's what you're assuming is going to happen. Poison didn't turn to any of you to ascertain that this would be the plan. None of you needed it.

There's no question of where you're going, and where you're going to end up.

Already, you can feel your shadow pulling away from you. Or maybe that's just the fact that you feel newly sluggish and you have to keep double-checking the positions of things to suit your brand new blind side. You keep drifting off and catch yourself staring out into the vespertine dark instead of making yourself useful. You keep running your hand over the eyepatch that Cola dug out from somewhere in the back of Dr. Death's station. The searing bolt-screw shaft of pain that once bled into the socket has faded into a phantom ache. It's possible that, given time, that too might fade. It's possible that, given time, you might learn to adjust to the injury. It's possible that, given time, you might learn to shoot just as well with one eye as you did with two.

Too bad that time isn't on your side right now. The longer you wait, the more time BL/ind has to prepare for your inevitable retaliation, so you don't wait around. You help the others load up the car and you're not ready to fight but you're ready to die and, really, haven't you always been?

You won't be making it through the night, you don't think. It'll be nothing short of a miracle if any of you do.

Ghoul does weapons checks that seem more compulsive than anything else. Kobra abandons his power glove as a lost cause. Poison, though -

Party Poison hands four masks to Dr. Death and tells him to meet them at the city line.

They didn't consult any of you on this, but once again, they hadn't needed to. You all watch it happen in silence. You all know, Dr. Death included, what it is that they're really asking of him, and what their volunteering of your collective souls means.

It's goodbye, plain and simple.

You're among the last to leave the station. You hesitate, then clap Dr. Death Defying once on the shoulder in thanks. He grabs your hand and squeezes tight, though not so tightly that you can't feel the tremor in his fingers. The Pony turns away with one hand pressed to their mouth. Then, when you turn to head out, they abruptly fling their arms around you in a sloppy hug. Before you can question what the hell they're doing and why, they release you and quickly duck back into the station.

You don't get the chance to say goodbye to Cherri Cola. You bid a prayer to the Witch for him when you pull out. You think you hear him shouting after you, but you don't look back.

The four of you streak freely down the length of the Getaway Mile beneath a star-spangled sky. You look up and glimpse, for the last time, the outlines of the constellation you and one of your dead friends once termed the Broken Vee-Eight. Your gaze settles on the spread of stars that the Girl called _yours_, tracing the contour of that vague lightning bolt shape until the heat pricks at your eye and you kiss your beads, one by one. Nine times for the nine souls you couldn't save. Three times for the family who now rides to their own deaths at your side.

And one for the Girl you love, more than anything.

****

**\--**

**when they are just blackened piles of rubble  
this is déjà vu personified**

**\--**

This time, you take the scarecrow access tunnel. The Trans Am screams through the underpass with the shriek of skidding tires and the complete lack of subtlety that has become so characteristic of the Fabulous Four. None of you lean out of the car to shoot when you meet your first layer of resistance; Poison simply drives it straight over the bastards and crushes them underneath the tires. The buzz of raygun fire heralds your approach, and then the siren screech of some exterminator managing to set off the city-wide alarms.

It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if the lights flash and the warning horns blare as you storm the city. They have your Girl, and you're going to bring her home. To hell with it, if it's the last act of the Fabulous Killjoys.

You wonder absently if it, if he, if they might be coming. You heard the words often enough, said them aloud to a service unit on the run from her manufacturers. _He will turn Battery City to ashes._

You wonder which will come for you first: Destroya, or the Witch.

It probably doesn't matter much in the end.

The Trans Am skids to a halt directly outside the hulking tower with its darkened windows and its bright, smiling logo. Just being back in Bat City again is enough to turn your stomach, but you don't stop. None of you stop. You get out of the car for what must be the last time in your life. You don't have time to bid it farewell, this bright gasoline bolt skinned in aluminum and color that's been your home for years now. You don't want to think about what Battery City will end up doing to it, so you focus solely on moving forward.

There's a faint drizzle in the air, wicking down your jacket as you move. The water tastes strange without the familiar, sulfuric tang of acid.

You keep your gun out and at the ready.

You mow down dracs and exterminators that have set themselves up to oppose you. You're horribly outnumbered and all of you know it. And you - your aim is off. Your shots consistently fail to hit the mark. You can't aim for heads and throats; you shoot for torsos, the largest centers of mass you can. Your easy accuracy has been compromised. Your head aches every time you try and squint with your remaining eye to compensate and you know that, on some level, Korse has already succeeded in killing you. Your reaction times aren't sharp enough and your hands aren't as steady. He's robbed you of your precision and he did it knowing full well that this will impede you in those critical moments that make all the difference between life and death.

You're shoulder to shoulder with your _manos_ as you blaze into the heart of the City. Through the cellophane-clear doors, and into the labyrinthine hallways within. You take each unflinching shot, cut down the targets with cold precision. Poison takes point. They've shuttered off into someone with a face carved from stone. There's none of their laughter and their vicious, self-assured grins as they lead their way through the place. None of you exchange a word to one another. There's nothing left to say. There's nothing at all but the high chirp of a laser, the smoke of a burn hole, the wordless yelp of a BL/ind exterminator going down.

The alien quiet between you is broken only by the shrill of alarms and the distant yell of gruff draculoid voices and exterminators barking orders to one another. Every time you meet resistance, you blow it away with four rayguns raised in blistering synchrony. You leave corpses steaming in your wake. You don't know how many dead this makes; you can't care about that right now.

No sign of Korse.

You expect he'll turn up soon enough.

Whether it's by fate or circumstance or the fact that some part of Poison remembers or has some knowledge of the layout of this place, they make each turn with an unerring confidence and an unbroken stride. You turn corner after corner and then you're staring at a S/C/A/R/E/C/R/O/W logo and just beyond that, impossibly, you see her.

She's cross-legged on the floor. All around her, draculoids sit at banks of monitors and blinking lights. None of them are at the ready to sufficiently resist you; the four of you pour into the room and then you pour unleaded lightning into the throats and faces of each and every one of them.

And then -

You've found her. You breathe out. Poison promptly folds downward on the spot, wraps her in a tight hug and she clings to them like they're her lifeline. Your throat aches with relief.

It's all right.

It'll be all right.

There's nothing left in the cavity of your chest but the serene knowledge that even if it all goes to hell now, even if it all gets ripped away - you did it. You found her. You're going to bring her back. She'll make it to the desert. She'll grow up warm and safe underneath the sun. She'll have the Show Pony to teach her how to move fast when the sun goes down, and she'll have Cherri Cola to show her how to shoot, and she'll have Dr. Death Defying to tell her what she is to the desert, and the hope she will bring.

She's your Girl. Your firecracker. Your _cielito._

You've found her, and you're going to bring her back safe.

You can't wait now. You and Kobra keep post at one end of the room while the Ghoul stands sentry at the other, but there's no time for anything but getting right the fuck out, right now.

The Girl's at the head while you all move down hallways lined with posters of your faces. She knows the way out of here better than any of you, and on top of that - BL/ind doesn't want her dead. If they wanted her dead they wouldn't have devoted so many resources to keeping her alive.

The lobby is directly ahead with its ceiling-to-floor, clear windows made of glass or plastic or some poorly defined composite. You're almost out when there's the inescapable hiss of elevator doors behind you -

And more of them come streaming out. 

The high-pitched crackle of laser fire immediately showers sparks just over your shoulders. You duck around, gun out and at the ready. The Girl has her hands over her ears, shifting back. You look to her briefly and your heart twists because there is nothing in her expression that indicates she's prepared for any of this to go sideways. No part of her looks remotely worried for the outcome, the secondary aftermath that BL/ind always talks about. Because you're here. You're here, and you've come to save her. And nothing could possibly go wrong if that's the case. Right?

Korse looks waxen underneath the glaring fluorescent lights. He looks awful, even for him. His eyes are reddened and gaunt and sunken into his skin.

There's no time.

Maybe once, you would have made for him - charged for him and not stopped until he was a smoking smear on the fucking floor. But you have one goal, and he's not a part of it. You have to secure your exit. No one else is near the doors save for Ghoul, so you and him make for the fucking doors. An exterminator tries to halt you. You sink a laser blast into their gut and leave them gasping on the ground without looking.

Poison and Kobra have ended up in the center of the lobby, back to back and without cover. The Girl's just behind them. She's not getting caught in this crossfire, not like this. You race forward in time to watch Poison rip a draculoid mask off of one of the thing's heads and blaze a fresh burn hole into the small of their back.

The drac sinks to the ground, all dark hair and empty expression.

Even in death, Benzo Mori is unmistakable.

Your heart clenches.

You do not have time to consider the weight of Cherri Cola's words. You do not have _time_ to dwell on it, because you can tell, you can _tell_ that it's already frozen Poison on the spot. They're breathing hard, staring at the mask in their hands. They're trying to recover. They're trying to shoot down the opposition, but they've still got their fingers wound into the mask's black synthetic hair and they look _scared._ They look scared in a way that Party Poison should _never be_.

They're leaving themself wide open. Kobra, though - the Kobra Kid has their back, doesn't he? He's been with them the longest. He has to know what to do next. He _has_ to, and you don't have time to consider the possibility that he doesn't. If you all die here this will have all been for nothing so you _can't stop now_ and so you don't. You run for the Girl.

You run for the Girl and you almost miss Korse when he gets to Poison before Kobra does.

You don't miss the moment that he pins them against the wall and they stare at him - scared, wide-eyed, and so, so far from the defiant face of the desert revolution that you've known for so long.

He jams the barrel of his gun underneath their chin, and he lights them up in a symphony of smoke and sound.

The Girl screams, and you -

You can't afford to process what's just happened. You can't afford to look at the smoking corpse of Party Poison, of your leader and your _friend_, the person who stopped the car and leaned out the window to ask you offhand if you were heading anywhere, who leaned up against you only when no one was watching, who has a laugh louder than god and a soul brighter than spitfire. You can't stop and you can't stare at them as they slump there lifeless against the wall. You can't look at them and take in the unnatural stillness, the polar opposite to the constant motion that has always defined them. You can't stop to process the sound that Kobra makes, something inarticulate and anguished and _animal_ that sounds like it's being ripped from his throat. You can't stop to do anything, _anything_ but what you came here to do. 

And when you lunge for the doors and Ghoul takes the Girl by the hand and you and him propel her toward the building's exit, you glimpse Kobra taking a shot to the gut trying to reach his dead sibling. You see him drop as if in slow motion, the Kid with his deft hand at machinery and his deadpan disposition, who was the first to come to you with an apology, who could lay a drac out in two well-placed hits, and you -

You don't stop.

The color of death isn't like the whorl of color inherent to a firefight. It's bitter white on void-black, brighter than sun-bleached bone.

You make it out into the crisp, icy air. The Girl follows you through, and then you watch Ghoul close the doors behind you. 

He closes the doors _behind_ you.

There's no mistaking his objective there. His eyes meet yours and you read his intentions in the blink of an eye even though your chest aches - _not again. Not again. Not again._

Fun Ghoul doesn't breathe a word. He doesn't have to.

You only look back at him once. As if that could be enough to seal him into your memory, preserve him as the killjoy who laughs too easily and can cook up a bomb with better brisance than anyone else in the Zones and who was the first person in your life to ask you if you felt like killing yourself and had done it with such a disarmingly blasé tone that you had no choice but to get into the car when he asked you to.

You see Ghoul turn and start shooting on the throng of dracs as they stream for him, and then you need to move. He won't be able to buy you more than a handful of seconds. The Girl turns back for him, as if surprised that he's not following, as if she could stop what's about to happen through force of will alone, but you grab her hand and you're both moving again.

You don't know when Ghoul goes down. You only know that BL/ind gets to him right before they get to you.

Of course they do.

They always have.

You're always the last person left.

You've broken every promise it took to get to this point. BL/ind took the Girl, and they've taken your family from you. You were supposed to be first. You were supposed to be the first to fucking go down but again, _again_ you're the last one alive and there's nothing you can do to change that.

There is _no time._ There is no time for that, for pity, for regret, for unearned _guilt,_ for anything but getting her out. You have to get her out. She is the most important thing in this world and if it means that you die getting her out, then you will gladly eat as many laser blasts at it takes. You would die a million times over if it means that she makes it out of here.

If you keep moving, the hollow pit of the loss of another crew won't catch up to you until it's too late for it to matter. It feels impossible to you that, after years of aching for it, you _do not want to die_ because dying now would mean the dissolution of everything you've worked for. You cannot die because the Girl needs you alive - she needs you to get her out of the City.

Above everything and anything else, you need to get her out.

You're not about to let your family die for nothing.

You make it to the Trans Am, but the BL/ind are already streaming out from the building after you. You turn, fire off several shots. 

And then a laser blast burns a hole into your chest.

You feel the impact of your back against the hood of the Trans Am belatedly, as though underwater. Everything cuts out, goes static and numb. The blast eats through your front in a wave that shocks your nerves into numbness long before you feel anything approaching pain. It soaks seeping warmth into the front of your shirt. You need to move. You can't. The taste of your blood is tar and copper on the roof of your mouth. The Girl - 

You can't see her.

You can't see anything but the color of your own death: yellow constellations scattered on blue.

You don't remember closing your eye. You can't see the sky. You feel rather than smell the tang of smoke and the wet sting of rain against your face, the gentle hum of the still-warm hood of the car underneath your skin.

_Keep her safe,_ you feel yourself think to the Witch desperately, in those last precious nanoseconds of consciousness you still have before your neurons fizzle out and your organs shut down and everything fades to black. You don't know what other thoughts you're supposed to have in death so you commit them to prayer and hope that will be enough. It has to be enough for her. _Please._

But there aren't any stars left.

And the lights go out.

After years of running and years of fighting and years of being stranded just outside the Witch's reach -

The lights finally, finally go out.

****

**\--**

**all full of love so much that my teeth are floating  
now**

**\--**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1\. It is not recommended that you sterilize knives (or anything else) with fire, as fire is not the most reliable method to clean your medical equipment. Please do not attempt to reenact any of the DIY medical procedures mentioned or described in this fic. The Zones don't have medical hotlines or reliable doctors, so meat grinder back alley surgery is pretty much the norm, and Jet's medical knowledge is very patchwork and mostly incomplete. I cannot stress enough how much that none of the procedures carried out here should not be performed by someone unless they know exactly what they're doing.
> 
> 2\. Likewise, I want to reiterate that one should never bind with duct tape or bandages. Always, always practice safe binding - get a binder that fits and is intended for your body, and never wear it for longer than intended.
> 
> 3\. Again, you'll probably recognize a few references buried in the lines. In particular, the name of the "Cemetery Window" joint, as well as its bartender, "Kerosene," are both in reference to the 2019 Red Vox album _Kerosene_. This chapter also contains a homage to a Keith Haring quote. The poems between the line breaks, as well as the title of this chapter, all come from old journal entries written by the ever-distinctive Pete Wentz; none are my own composition.
> 
> 4\. The Fabulous Four's conversation regarding The Mad Gear and Missile Kid entail the names of albums and records that, other than the "self-titled debut," I made up for the purposes of this fic. If anyone's interested, here's my list of Mad Gear releases up until 2016, which is (roughly) when that discussion took place:
>
>> _The Mad Gear and Missile Kid_ \- EP, 2009 (5:48)  
_Fuck Your Damage Control_ \- EP, 2010 (7:45)  
_Straight through to hell. Till the morning come.._ \- LP, 2012 (11:34)  
_SkeleTon KreW_ \- EP, 2012 (3:04)  
_TROMOTIZED_CONDITIONS_ \- LP, 2015 (10:22)  
_Nobody fucking loves you_ \- LP, 2016 (12:56)

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [no rays from the holy heaven come down](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23403700) by [eluvion](https://archiveofourown.org/users/eluvion/pseuds/eluvion)


End file.
